


Tainted Souls

by Kammyh



Series: Tainted Time Eclipse [3]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Angst and Humor, Children of Earth Fix-It, Complete, Drama, F/M, Fix-It, Friendship, Immortal Ianto Jones, M/M, Porn, Resurrection, Romance, Science Fiction, Sequel, Spoilers, Swearing, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-18 16:45:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 54,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1435594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kammyh/pseuds/Kammyh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto is finally back, how will he cope with the new chance offered to him? How will Torchwood and the rest of the universe do it? JANTO CoE fix-it. Donna fix-it. Sequel to Eclipse on the Lost Lovers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Remember

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue, bring Ianto back to Jack first.

**Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY. Before this, you should read Eclipse on the Lost Lovers, but I think you can easily guess what happened along the way. No Jack Harkness got harmed during the writing of _this_ chapter.

 

 

The night was cold, silent and completely dark. The sky was a black curtain empty of stars, and without the few working lights at the sides of the road, it would have been almost impossible to walk around the streets at such late hour in the night.

Jack had no idea why he had waited this long to come here, but now no matter what the hour was, he had to do this. It was true that they still had a week, but he had kept himself shielded from reality too much and too long, and it had finally come the time for him to confront the one woman he had probably hurt the most with his continuous running-away charade.

He _had_ to confront her now, before someone could come and help him find excuses to delay something he was supposed to have done not just three months prior to this evening, but way before that. Way before that damn day of four years before.

Even if he still felt skittish about the final confrontation, he knew that he had at least to give her enough time to elaborate the same information that had kept him on his toes for the last three months. After all his attempts to stay away from her house, he knew he owned her that much.

He looked at his mobile and sighed: it was 10:15 PM already. A pretty bad time to come unannounced in a house with two young children; Jack cursed himself, wondering what had kept him away so long that it ended up on a matter of ‘ _do it now or never_ ’.

Oh yeah: good old guilt.

A word that had marked his life in more ways than one would think possible: guilt for letting Grey’s hand go, guilt for putting people in danger through his irresponsible cons, guilt from coming back to life when others didn’t, guilt about appearing young while his friends and lovers kept getting old, guilt from the wrong decisions he made, guilt for the blood he had to spill, guilt for the truths he couldn’t tell. 

Jack checked once again the address to be certain he was finally in front of the right house, and felt a little more relieved seeing the lights inside one of the rooms at ground floor. Maybe he would be unwelcome, but at least he didn’t wake them up in the middle of the night. That _had_ to count as a plus, didn’t it?

He thought about ringing the doorbell for a moment, but after a more attentive consideration he chose to simply knock on the door and hope that someone would hear it, since he wasn’t certain if the kids were still awake or not.

After a few moments of confused noise and loud chattering in a mix of English and Welsh from inside the house, finally someone opened the door, and he found himself staring into the suspicious eyes of Rhiannon Davies.

*** Three months before ***

Jack woke up from a nap he didn’t remember taking, and tried to open his eyes to take in his still blurred surroundings. Even though he felt confused and completely out of sorts, he realised all too soon that he was inside a tent: he knew this couldn’t be good. After all the last time he went camping, he and his co-workers had ended up almost being cannibalized.

A sharp pain stabbed his chest as soon as the memory crossed his mind, bringing forward way more recent events.

His co-workers. All except Gwen were now dead. His brave and gentle lover included.

All of sudden he had no desire to get up at all.

He was rudely dragged back from his dazed reverie by a light rustling noise, like the one of a material being moved, suddenly followed by a way louder series of indistinct sounds.

“Rhys, he’s awake!!” Gwen’s voice seemed nearby, but he was much too confused to place where she actually was at the moment, so he simply waited where he was, hoping that she would willingly stop making his head throb with her yells. “Jack! Oh my God Rhys! Jack’s awake!”

A strong arm encircled his shoulders and Jack felt someone trying to help him in a sitting position. He tried to keep his head straight, but the only thing he could manage was resting it on the nearest available surface: Rhys’s shoulder.

“You’re fine, mate?” Rhys asked in a much softer tone than Gwen’s yells, giving him a light slap on the cheek. “Gwen, a glass of water ‘ere.”

Jack heard someone scrambling around, moving pans, crashing glass and bouncing against plastic, until silence reigned again and he saw Gwen’s legs approaching again with the corner of his eyes. After a moment, a glass of water was placed in front of him, lingering on his lips.

He grimaced at the cold wetness and tried to get away from the offending liquid, symbol of a life that seemed to keep mocking him wherever he went, but Rhys shifted him well enough to make him drink some of it anyway, with the practice of a perfectly trained father.

Despite his initial protests, the cold water actually cleared Jack’s mind a little bit, and he felt good enough to try sitting up by himself again.

“Thanks.” He muttered grumpily, holding his head with his hand.

“What happened, Jack?” Gwen knelt down in front of him, her big green eyes staring at him worried. “Where’s Ianto?Has he already gotten back home with the others?”

Jack stared at her in disbelief. What the heck was she talking about?

“Gwen, Ianto’s dead.”

Contrary to every expectation, Gwen simply smiled at him.

“Well yes, at the moment… but you _know_ that he won’t stay that way for much longer. Anyhow, I was talking about the other Ianto, the one from the future.” 

His mouth fell open, but each time he tried to articulate something it seemed inappropriate or trivial, so in the end he simply shut it. Gwen reached for his cheek and stroked it, now sincerely concerned.

“You alright, Jack? It’s not like you not babbling about.” She cooed, trying to go for humour to hide her worry. “Future Ianto, remember? Big turtle aliens, my look-alike not speaking Welsh, black Owen, and cheeky siblings?”

Jack’s eyes stared at her without giving any sign of recognizing what she was talking about. It was like he not only did not _remember_ , but also like he couldn't _make any sense_ out of what she was talking about. Gwen watched him intently for a while, hoping to get some reaction, but she realized soon that everything was in vain. She nodded, tightening her lips in her trademark ‘ _I’m-trying-to-reassure-you’_ smile, and took one of his arms tight in hers, motioning for Rhys to do the same with the other.

“Ok, love.” She said, talking slowly. “Nothing to worry about, now. We’ll get you to the nearest hospital. You won’t have to worry about a single thing.”

The restriction and the sudden loss of the leading role finally got some reaction out of Jack.

“Let me get this straight: _you_ talk about meeting a dead man and _I_ need to get myself checked up in a hospital. Who’s the one sounding mental here?” Jack argued, trying to free himself without much luck.

“The alternative is me taking a blood sample out of you, would you like that?” She quickly replied deadly serious.

Jack glared at Gwen’s determinate stare for a long time, then grimaced and eventually snarled at her.

“Lead the way.”

They managed to get him inside the minivan and then set out for the hospital. As soon as Gwen finished calling the police, along with some other trusted people to clean up the remains of their camp and the attempted alien invasion Jack didn’t remember happening, she finally relaxed at his side on the back seat of the car, smiling reassuringly at him. The captain answered with an angry look and simply kept sulking.

“Why are we using this minivan?” He snapped at her before she could start some of her reassuring tales. “We’ve got a completely new SUV back in Cardiff.”

“We had weapons with us.” She explained slowly and calmly. “Lots of. There wasn’t enough space for them and us on the SUV.”

“We are three.” Jack complained with a hint of challenge, making Gwen’s seraphic smile waver a bit.

“We were not three, Jack. There were five of us. You, me, black Owen, snarky sister and Ianto. Rhys went ahead with the snarky brother to build a device we needed in order to defeat them, but all the other weapons were with us.”

Jack searched in his memory to find something vaguely similar to what Gwen was describing, but everything about the day before and that morning was blank. He shook his head and his best friend put her hand on his shoulder trying to comfort him.

“You think it’s the same thing that made you forget me that time?” Rhys took his chance to ask his wife from the driver’s seat. Gwen grimaced unsure.

“Hope is not. We never found out what it was in the end, and we all ended up forgetting two whole days.” She said before turning to her boss. “Jack, you sure you remember absolutely nothing? Not even how you felt? You’ve been pretty shocked by Ianto’s coming back, that _must_ ring a bell.”

“Last thing I remember was the graveyard.” Jack said uncertain. “My heart breaking, looking at his tombstone. Then… I remember feeling warmth around me. Something… that made me believe that everything would turn out ok in the end. After that… just a dull pain, atrocious, worst I ever had. And despair. Then the warmness came again and everything else disappeared. Then I simply woke up.”

“Pain, you say? Maybe you died?” Gwen guessed, sounding a little bit too hopeful for the subject at hand.

“It was worse than dying.” Jack said looking straight in her eyes, not at all bothered by the casual ways everyone kept referring to his deaths. “It was like Thames House all over again.”

Gwen smiled awkwardly. “So… Maybe you thought Ianto was dead again? But in the end he wasn’t, and that reassured you.”

Jack considered her words and shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

He mulled over the various things Gwen had told him since he’d woken up and considered how he felt. Dizziness aside, he could finally say that he was fine, even though thinking back, he remembered having been so desperate back at the graveyard that he was almost feeling sick.

The graveyard… The last thing he remembered was… hearing Ianto’s voice? It sounded like that, now that he tried to remember, searching desperately for the exact point his memories had vanished. So, Gwen wasn’t the crazy one, she actually had a point. Could it be that…

“Gwen, tell me the truth. You reckon they retconned me?”

She shuddered, but couldn’t even pretend a forced smile this time. She simply swallowed and nodded at him. They stared at each other for a long time, before both turned their attention to the road, until the minivan eventually stopped.

“We’re ‘ere.” Rhys announced. “You get going, I’ll park the minivan.”

Jack and Gwen sighed and then walked out the car to go and use up a bit of their newly restored authority. After they finally managed to get a nurse take Jack’s blood sample and send it to the laboratories for an immediate analysis, they were left waiting for what it seemed like forever, until finally a young medic approached them.

“You’re the members of Torchwood Cardiff, aren’t you? The ones with the blood sample?”

They both nodded and approached the man, hoping and dreading at the same time that he finally had the much wanted results.

“Yeah, sorry to be a bother. We still don’t have a doctor of our own so…” Gwen trailed off as the medic simply nodded to her.

“The nurse told me you were searching for a particular compound. Compound…”

“Compound B67,” Jack supplied.

“Yeah. Well, we didn’t find it in the blood sample we took actually.” Jack and Gwen’s faces fell at his words. “But we found something that we believe to be a derivative of that compound. Is quite original, if we discover that to be true, I must tell you that.”

“A derivative?” Jack asked, astonished. “Does it mean that it has the same properties of the original?”

“Compound B67 is classified, so… You tell me, Captain Harkness. We have no way to verify that for sure, but being a derivative I’m fairly certain that the results are almost identical. We analyzed the data and cross-referenced the results with similar modifications in similar molecules. Whatever your compound does, this one is definitely a less aggressive version of the original and I would also say a little more stable and permanent one.”

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much more that the medic could do for them, even though he seemed competent enough to be kept on watch in case of a future recruitment. They simply thanked him and disappeared back to Rhys and the minivan, both still mulling over the news and making a mental note to call Martha later on for a deeper insight consultation.

The thought to actually let the young medic in Torchwood only stayed in their minds few seconds before they crossed it out. They had too much to deal with at the moment.

“So,” Jack said after they got inside the car and briefed quickly Rhys on the recent discoveries. “To do a retcon-wise interpretation of what the doctor said, this particular derivative instead of wiping out everything giving a slight chance of recovery, could be a permanent removal of facts and events with the additional note that you can’t prevent yourself from knowing that something was supposed to be there. Great. Simply perfect.”

“I think it was sweet of him.” Gwen countered warmly.

Jack raised an eyebrow at her suspiciously, waiting for an explanation.

“Well, they _were_ secretive about something, maybe you found out what it was eventually. He _needed_ to erase that, but at the same time he didn’t want to take away from you the love you shared. Even though he was here only for a small time, he _really_ managed to bring you back, Jack.”

Silence fell among them as he pondered what she had told him, letting Rhys take the main road and drive them through the long ride back to Cardiff.

“How was he?” Jack asked after a long time.

Gwen didn’t need explanation for that question so out of the blue, since it was quite obvious who her friend was referring to.

“Ianto.” She answered, smiling at him. “He was simply Ianto. He got you back from the bottom as if work of magic, just being his mysterious and charming self.”

A knowing smirk graced his lips, as he considered how Ianto’s magic could work. Truth to be told he didn’t _feel_ like he had sex recently, but his tired muscles and the dull calmness all over himself made him rather certain that they had been at least fooling around. And he had drunk Ianto’s coffee. He was _sure_ he could feel the orgasmic sensation his lover’s coffee had on him still lingering.

Maybe he had been wrong about the drug. Compared to the normal retcon, he definitely liked this new version better, even without the chance to recover what he had lost.

“You said he will be back?”

“Our Ianto will be, yes. In three months.” Gwen confirmed, but had to take a deep breath before continuing. “Ianto said it will be a big deal to take in for everyone, and that he will need our help. Didn’t say why though.”

Jack smirked bitterly at her, easily guessing what the problem was going to be.

“It’s awkward being back again when you thought you had already crossed the line forever, Gwen, and I can talk from experience. At least the hub is as it was, that could help him not to feel like four years passed.”

“Still four years _have passed_ Jack, and that hub’s a _grave_. We _need_ to make it alive again. He said so himself.”

Jack looked at her, never feeling more tired. “And how do we do that?”

Gwen smiled at him and tilted her head to the side, offering her simple solution. “We live and work in there, especially now that the rift is slowly becoming active again. It will be good for Ianto to know his work is still waiting for him, as unpredictable as he had always loved it. As much as he will certainly appreciate the strength his friends, family and boyfriend will provide.”

Jack broke eye contact with her to glance uninterested at a distant point far across the road and frowned.

His boyfriend.

Sometimes he found himself thinking about Ianto as his boyfriend, but how much was it fair to Ianto if he considered himself his boyfriend now, even though he had never told him it was ok give a name to what they were? He knew his lover reasonably thought of himself as such, but how was he going to react at being called like that by Jack himself once back to the living?

It wasn’t even a question, actually. He would believe he pitied him. And it would be pity also telling him he loved him, because Jack had never had the courage to say those stupid three words when he was alive, and he doubted Ianto would acknowledge what they had told each other at the House of Dead if by chance he remembered it.

His last memories would have been Jack telling him he was going to die like an ugly dog, that he would watch him die and go on with his life and that he didn’t think Ianto was dependable enough to listen to his secrets. He would have the certainty that he had just been scraping the surface. Maybe that was the meaning of his lover’s entire drama about couples… He had kept pointing it out because he wanted him to acknowledge they were one, the same way Jack had vaguely acknowledged that they were together back at the hospital, when they were retrieving the hitchhiker.

He hadn’t even understood that Ianto wanted him to say out loud that they _were_ a couple, despite their rough beginning, despite Torchwood and despite everything and everyone. He knew Ianto would have never imposed himself, that he would have never dared to ask. Ianto _needed_ Jack to say it was ok, because not only was it hard for him admit his falling for a man, but also because officially they were still boss and underling, leader and part-time shag.

It was Jack’s place to set the restrictions of their relationship, and he had failed him.

However, despite the loss of material memory, he was certain he remembered he had felt Ianto’s love and his warmth, so there _had_ to be still hope for the two of them. He just needed to figure out how they were going to go from the present mess to there.

“You worried? Let me help you with this, Jack. Rhys can join too if he wants.” Gwen’s mother hen expression faded away for a few seconds as she glared at her husband for support. Rhys saw that with the corner of his eye and obviously panicked, ending up stuttering on words.

“P-part time’s fine with me. Considering Anwen, I-I mean. She needs at least a parent that can stay with her, but every time you need help you can count on me!”

The ghost of a smile appeared on Jack’s lips and he thanked them before losing himself again in his thoughts, hoping to remember something more about the last 24 hours. He stared at nowhere for a long time, until he finally realized he had left out an important matter among all the things Gwen had told him.

“Shit, we’ll have to tell Rhiannon.”

Gwen’s eyes widened and she swallowed, Rhys paled visibly and Jack slumped deeper on his seat, boneless , while the silence reigned in the car for the rest of their trip back to Cardiff.

* **Back to the present** *

“No gentleman shows up at this hour in a house with two kids sleeping! Don’t you dare ring and get _lost_! We buy nothin’.”

Rhiannon was already closing the door when Jack leaped over and grabbed the knob to keep it open. The glare she threw at him almost made him completely lose the grip.

“I just need a moment of your time, it’s important.” Jack tried to explain quickly in order to prevent her reactions. “And yes, I _do_ realise it’s late, in every possible meaning, but I was too much of a coward to do this before.”

He noticed her glare melting away as she raised an enquiring eyebrow at him. He eventually let the handle go, hoping that he could trust her enough to not shut him out. Jack not only knew that Rhiannon’s will to listen to him didn’t mean he was already in a safe zone, but also that his only hope was that the sister was less calculative than her brother.

Last time he had found himself in the same situation with Ianto, as soon as he had let the knob go, his extremely irate lover had smiled mischievously at him and closed the door back in his face. Luckily, Rhiannon had no reason to be angry at him _yet_ , and the small hint of curiosity in her eyes made him hope for a good outcome of the visit. She opened the door a little wider, but she still didn’t step aside, regarding his suspiciously.

“You say who you are fist. And know that my husband went to get the rifle. If you want to try something funny, you chose the wrong family, mate.”

Jack swallowed, reasonably suspecting that his name wasn’t in the Davies’s good list to begin with, and it would probably rise up to the top bad ones the moment he would tell them the reason for his visit.

“I’m captain Jack Harkness-”

“You’re police!?” She interrupted him with a frown, closing the door a bit more. “We want nothin’ to do with you after-”

“I’m no police!” Jack retorted, trying to stay calm and cursing himself for always beginning things the wrong way with all the Jones he met from this particular family. “And I don’t want anything to do with them either for your same reasons!”

Contrary to his previous assumption, that actually made Rhiannon’s anger utterly deflate. She looked at him puzzled and a bit hurt, as she swallowed, fearing the answer her question could get.

“What d’you mean?”

“I’m Jack, Ianto’s boss… Ianto’s boyfriend.”

“Oh.” She whispered, letting the door knob go, as her arms fell to her sides. “Little late for gettin’ and givin’ condolences you are.”

“I-I know.” He said sadly and lowered his eyes. “May I come in?”

Rhiannon nodded and moved aside, gesturing him to go inside the kitchen. Once he got there he found Johnny glaring at him suspiciously. _Rifle-less_. Rhiannon had fooled him well; he knew it had to run in the family.

As soon as the woman joined them in the kitchen, Johnny’s stare fixed on his wife.

“What does this mean, Rhia? Who the fuck is the bloke!?”

“Don’t shout! The kids are in bed!” She shouted, glaring at him severely. “And keep quiet, he’s Ianto’s bloke, not mine!”

Silence reigned for a few seconds, while Johnny’s stare moved back to Jack, eyeing him distrustfully and scanning him from head to toe. In the Welshmen head lots of _not-so-nice_ definitions passed for the captain: the faggot who fucked his secretary, the coward without the guts to make an appearance at Ianto’s funeral, the bastard responsible for Ianto’s death –because leaders are there to take the blame.

Eventually, he found something he believed proper enough to say.

“You’re so old you could be his father… But he always liked older, even girlfriends.”

Jack snorted, but realized after his experience with Rhys that he had got off lightly. Rhiannon on the other hand shook her head, and glared at them both.

“Be quiet I said, and sit down! Both of you!”

However when all of them were seated, no one had the daring to be the first to talk. In the end Rhiannon glanced nonchalantly at Jack, her full lips barely visible behind her hands and pursed in concentration.

“So… What’ve you done in these four years? You’ve been so quick disappearing that you didn’t even make it to his funeral.” Her stare became more piercing with each sentence, like she was consciously building up a crescendo of guilt to throw at him. “We’ve never seen you. Barely knew who you were.”

Trust a Jones not to take it from afar and score nevertheless. Jack took a deep breath and stared at a random point in Rhiannon’s general direction, not trusting himself to actually look at her in the eyes.

“I’ve…travelled the Earth to find a way to have him back, but when I managed to get him, well… things didn’t go as planned. I failed even my own suicide. I fled everywhere and nowhere in particular. Came back, went to America a couple of times… I thought I was getting better, turns out I really wasn’t.”

Jack realized that the even tone he had managed through the story was wavering, so he had to stop in order to let the lump constricting his throat shrink enough to let him actually explain his visit. Rhiannon noticed his moment of pain and reached for his hand, patting it comfortingly.

“So you came back?” She smiled, taking in Jack’s appearance. “You look a fairly decent though. I s’ppose.”

“Well, that’s the reason I came here actually.” Jack said in a whisper, taking a deep breath. “Gwen and Ianto told you that we deal with aliens and strange things, and this is what Torchwood is trying to do even now. I can’t offer many details, because that part of my memory has been erased, but something came up.”

“But what I can tell you,” He continued, finally focussing straight on Rhiannon’s eyes. “Is that Ianto will come back soon. A future version of him came to help us dealing with some aliens and he said that in less than a week he is going to be revived.”

“Even admitting that this is true…” She argued, not actually knowing what to make of Jack’s predicament. “You say you have no memories, how can you be sure of this?”

“Gwen met him and I saw a scrap of footage that hasn’t been deleted with the rest. He looked a bit older and had a couple of grey hairs… But he _was_ Ianto. She said we also tested him and he proved to be the real one. There are still the results on the logs. And…” Jack trailed off, uncertain if he wanted or not share the last bit of information with the Davies.

“And?” Johnny urged him to go on.

“And I-I…” Jack sighed and decided to let out everything in a single rush, no matter how crazy it sounded. “I know you can call me weird, but…even though I don’t remember the _facts_ and the _people_ , I remember how I felt in those 24 hours with him. And God, I felt good.”

Rhiannon and Johnny raised their eyebrows at him, but it took Jack some time to realize what the others’ stares meant. When it clicked, he simply rolled his eyes and scowled at them. “Not that! I just felt loved. Loved the way he loved me.”

“Look, your story is… incredible.” Johnny said, trying to be a little bit more considerate in his choice of words this time. “But, you know, after four years you still didn’t get over his death… Don’t you think that -just maybe- your friend made everything up just to make you happy? Just a suggestion ‘ere, mate. Don’t take it wrong.”

“I _am_ sure. Even thought she had faked all the records at the base, it wouldn’t explain the way I feel.”

“Maybe you only convinced yourself. Pain can do that.” Rhiannon offered tenderly, but Jack simply stood up, determination flaring in his eyes.

“Look, I’m not here for counselling. I just wanted to let you know this beforehand, because things will be hell for Ianto when he wakes up. If he’s not going to have his family’s support, I need to know it beforehand. I don’t want to make things too hard on him when he will be asking for you.”

“Don’t be stupid, mate!” Johnny roared, slamming his hands on the table and getting on his feet to level with Jack’s eyes. “Of course he has our support! We need no time to think that over! We’re the only family he’s got, for God’s sake! If he really comes back, it’s just how things _have_ to be: for him to be part of his own family again!”

It took all Jack's strength to not openly comment how homoerotic the situation was getting. He would need some private time to think about how these situations happened with the Welshmen. Always with the Welshmen.

Focusing back on the matter at hand, Jack took a moment to look closely at Johnny and then at Rhiannon. In their eyes he could see the same hurt he was feeling. Since more or less they knew about Torchwood, he had momentarily forgotten that they were just ordinary civilians. It was obvious that they did not dare to hope having Ianto back. Still, they were a family that was willing to stay as such, and he only had to hope that they would keep that in mind even in front of the actual deed.

He knew too well what being refused by your own family meant, and he would never wish it to his lover.

“Thank you.”

Rhiannon stared concernedly at him and pressed her lips tight together, like she was struggling to say something, but she didn’t know how to formulate it. Eventually she simply stood up and walked steadily next to Jack, gripping strongly his arm with her hand.

“I want you to call me when you go to get him. No matter the hour, just call me.”

Jack smirked bitterly at her. “Why? Because families stick together?”

She wetted her lips and then nodded. “Yeah. Because you’re part of this family too if you want to.”

He looked at her puzzled, not understanding the meaning behind those words.

“Whether Ianto comes back or not,” Rhiannon said slowly. “A member of my family’s going to need me when it happens… Or not happens for what that matter.”

Jack let her words sunk in, fretting at the thought of letting himself fall for the illusion of belonging to a proper family again. Hope was painful for him, and Ianto had been a quite vivid reminder of it.

“I thought you hated me.” He tried to reason, frowning at her.

“Can’t like the one who stole my brother now, can I?” Jack found himself laughing at the words of the stubborn woman. “And four years is a long time. Never been said we deny help when needed.”

“I’m no good with families.” He argued, not having the slightest idea of how to deal with Rhiannon’s offering considering his current situation with Ianto.

“No need to be, we’re good enough. Just follow the lead.”

Again Jack had to stifle a laugh, and this time Rhiannon joined too, her eyes shining in delight as she closed up the space between them even more.

“Now” Rhiannon stated, tightening her grip on Jack’s arm and leading him towards the couch. “First things first: material needs. You sleep here tonight, not a word about it. Tomorrow, you’ll have a good home-cooked breakfast, and only when I’m sure you are fine and well rested you’re free to go.”

“Actually-” Jack tried to argue, but Johnny patted him on the shoulder to stop him and shook his head.

“Don’t try that, mate. Never worked.” Then he pointed upstairs and made sign to Jack to follow him. “Get a blanket or you’ll be freezin’ down ‘ere.”

Jack gave a last appreciative look at Rhiannon and then followed Johnny upstairs. He ended up in what he supposed to be their bedroom, so he politely leaned on the wall right next to the entrance, waiting for Johnny to finish rummaging inside the wardrobe to get the blanket.

“You’ve better not to try funny things with me, mate.” The man said, eyeing suspiciously Jack, who was so amused by Johnny’s random reaction that he barely felt offended at all.

“Look, sorry to crush your hopes, but there’s only one person in this house that could be my type and I’m not talking about you.”

“What d’you mean?” Johnny asked warily, offering him the blanket to take.

“Rhiannon has really a lot of my Ianto,” Jack teased. “If she and I were free, I wouldn’t mind hitting on her, you know.”

“You!” Johnny accused him, totally shocked. “You play for both teams!”

Jack _had_ to smirk one of his most flippant smiles at that. “Actually, you name a team and I play for it.”

He turned away from Johnny, who was still staring at him with his mouth hanging open, winked at him and went back inside the kitchen to meet up again with Rhiannon.

Oh, yes. This family thing was already going on pretty well.

**T.B.C.**


	2. Back to life

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue bring Ianto back to Jack first.

 **Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY. No Ianto Jones got harmed during the writing of _this_ chapter.

The following morning Jack was awakened by small, delicate and extremely cold hands, prodding curiously at his face. He opened one eye to check his surroundings and he found a little blond girl retreating from him. She drew back even more when he opened the other eye and sat up, smiling warmly at her.

“Good morning, young lady. You must be Mica.”

The ten years old girl blushed and nodded, looking curiously at him through long eyelashes.

“Do not harass uncle Jack, Mica. Go ‘n’ wash your hands!” Rhiannon promptly interrupted as she joined them.

Jack felt a sting of pain at the way he had been called, his thoughts going immediately to his grandson even though he knew he had never been a real uncle to him to begin with. However he still managed to control his feelings well enough to look enquiringly at the woman.

“We don’t have an uncle Jack.” The girl argued, voicing more or less the same thoughts he‘d had.

“He’s your uncle Ianto’s boyfriend.” Rhiannon explained to both of them condescendingly, glaring at Jack’s surprised stare and showing her daughter out in the general direction of the bathroom. “That makes him uncle Jack, doesn’t it?”

Jack could swear he heard the little girl squeal and giggle as she ran up the stairs, undoubtedly to share the news with her brother, and not to wash her hands like her mother had told her to.

“Sorry ‘bout that. Kids.”

He stifled a laugh, realizing that he was doing it a lot around Rhiannon. He wondered for a moment why he hadn’t popped up at her door sooner, but he had to admit that without the promise to have Ianto back in a short while, the family resemblance would have simply destroyed him further instead of amusing him.

“Had a couple myself, I know what you mean.” He said, and to avoid further questions he stood up to help Rhiannon setting the table for breakfast. “Let me be of some help.”

She nodded and left him to arrange the dishes and cups she had taken out, moving back near the stove to check on the breakfast.

“You know,” She said not much after, attempting some small talk. “Johnny told me about the conversation you two had before bedtime.”

Her voice was completely plain, not giving a single hint of her opinion on the matter. Even considering that aspect of her character, Jack couldn’t stop comparing the woman to her brother.

“Don’t worry, I won’t try anything with a married woman.” Jack defended himself, hoping that his charming smile could let him get away with everything he was accused of even though Rhiannon wasn’t actually looking at him.

“I mean, is nice that you consider yourself still taken after all these years.” She explained plainly, looking at him with the corner of her eye to check his reactions.

Jack’s jaw fell open and he stared at her, processing slowly the implications of her words. He hadn’t actually noticed that lately he had been assuming that he and Ianto would be back together once he was resuscitated.

“I- Well…” He bent down his head and focused back on his task, trying to hide his insecurities. “I didn’t consider myself taken for a long time if I have to tell the truth. But… If there’s even a slight chance that Ianto returns, I’ll do everything I can to have him back at my side. In all possible meanings.”

Rhiannon smiled at him. “He will appreciate that, I’m sure of it. Now, you go ‘n refresh yourself a bit, and then breakfast, old man. Got my telephone number written on a piece of paper ready for you to pick up before you go.”

And with those final words she shooed him away with a satisfied smirk.

* **Six days later, 3:27 AM** *

“Can’t resurrections take place at normal hours under the sunlight?” Rhiannon said as a way of greeting to Jack and Gwen. “Bloody graveyards give me the chills.”

Gwen smiled up at her. “Hello to you too, Rhi. Long time no see.”

Rhiannon simply nodded and closed her coat tighter around her.

“Hi, Rhia. Sorry for the late call.” Jack mumbled, his attention completely focused on the strange device he was holding. It was similar to a box with tentacles, with beeping lights on the top and a small, dead display that covered almost a whole side of it. The captain kept moving the appendages at different angles, but apparently without effectively lighting up the small monitor.

“We had no idea how Ianto was going to come back to us,” Gwen explained to her, shrugging uncomfortably. “We settled cameras around here just in case, but they didn’t show anything unusual even if we noticed a spike of energy in the area. It traced back exactly here-”

“But the signal disappeared about thirty minutes ago.” Jack continued, still busying himself with the box. “And we can’t get it back.”

“So… What are you doing?” Rhiannon asked with a frown.

“ _I_ personally was trying to convince Jack to at least remove the earth over Ianto’s coffin, so the rescue would be quicker at the next spike. You know, since the signal boosted right over his tomb, there are reasonably more chances that he could actually come out from here… Still, Jack wanted you here first.”

Truth to be told, Rhiannon felt a twinge of pain herself at the suggestion, having still clear in her mind the picture of her beloved little brother, resting pale and unmoving in that very same coffin. Nevertheless she had always been a practical woman and without a doubt Gwen was right, so she simply took a deep breath and tried her best to steady her voice.

“Sounds the most logical thing to do to me. This obviously, if we are willing to go on with this madness.”

Her answer shook Jack out of his concentration and he finally looked up at the two expectant Welshwomen. He took a deep breath and nodded, staring at them with an expression that couldn’t be called in any other way but ‘ _outnumbered_ ’. He took it over himself to take the shovel and dig the dark earth out of the way, leaving grudgingly the weird shaped box in Gwen’s care.

When he had almost reached the coffin, he heard a thump coming from inside and then a cry that sounded suspiciously like his Ianto. They all hastened together to remove the remaining earth and force open the top, realising that it wouldn’t took long for the man to die again by lack of oxygen.

Gwen quickly took out something similar to a gun from her pocket and with a click of the trigger she made the nails securing the lid disappear in thin air, leaving Jack and Rhiannon free to finally take it out of the way. As soon as the cover opened, Ianto threw instinctively his arms around the neck of the nearer of the three, who was accidentally his former lover.

No matter how much sure Jack had been that his man was going to come back to him, having Ianto back in his arms froze him to the core. Only when he realized that the dirty man clinging to him was shaking in fear and whimpering softly, he protectively closed his arms around his waist and firmly held him against him.

Ianto panicked getting a so familiar reaction from who he believed to be a stranger, but as soon as Jack’s unique scent filled his nostrils, he relaxed again and tightened his grip on the man he himself, glad to be in his lost lover’s familiar arms.

After that first moment of comfort though, what had happened slowly came back to him and he hastily freed himself from Jack‘s embrace to look around himself. The coffin, the fresh earth forming four walls around them, worms crawling all around and…

“Jack… Rhiannon…Gwen.” He stated each name every time sounding more and more desperate rather than happy to see them, already dreading the confrontation. He swallowed and stared at each of them in turn with wide eyes. “Ok, from 1 to 10 how busted am I?”

The others’ worried stares melted in a smile and they all sniggered at the light joke. Jack leaned dangerously in his personal space, and all Ianto’s attention focused back on the captain.

“Let me see. You lied to your friend, lost your sister’s car and left your lover alone for four long years.” He told him in a fake disappointed scowl. “I should say pretty much over thirty.”

Ianto swallowed down his guilt, but was rewarded by the saddest and loving smile Jack ever gave him. “Welcome back, Ianto. You have no idea how much you were missed.”

Everyone was fighting the urge to jump on Ianto and hug him tight, but they also guessed it was a bit too early, since he still didn’t seem to have gotten over his shock and confusion. It would have been unwise to suffocate him with hugs and questions, especially when they took into account the lost and scared expression on the Welshman’s face and his still tearful eyes.

“But… How am I back?”

Jack’s smile was the first to fade. “No idea. We hoped that _you_ might know... Do you remember anything weird or strange?”

“Nothing.” Ianto answered uncertain, as panic took once again the best of him. “Me dying and then darkness. That’s all.”

Jack lowered his gaze and also Gwen and Rhiannon looked away from Ianto, a little bit ashamed with themselves for not having thought about an answer to give to him beforehand.  

The following silence unfortunately didn’t do much good to Ianto’s nerves, since the dread for his unpredicted future and the horror for the possible meaning of the others’ silence were already making him feel more than a bit uneasy.

He frantically searched around himself for anything unusual, peeked over the edge of the grave to be sure that there wasn’t someone suspicious near and then checked behind his head in case his co-workers had managed to retrieve another Risen Mitten, but he was each time more terrified as his researches failed to produce results one after the other.

“But… How much have I got?”

“Be happy about that, love,” Gwen said, trying to reassure him with a smile as she stopped her hand from darting forward to pat his hand. “As much as we know, you’re in for the long haul.”

Instead of feeling reassured, Ianto got even more scared than he already was, as doubts and suspects filled his panicked mind. He felt pretty much alive, but so had Owen when he had discovered he wasn’t going to be dead again soon after they used the Risen Mitten on him. He wouldn’t stand a half-life like the one his co-worker had been condemned to for a short while: it had been too painful to see. Living it himself wasn’t an option.

He checked his own pulse and felt a little bit relieved noticing that his heart seemed to be beating regularly despite the extreme coldness of his skin to his own touch. He stared back at his friends and family. Certainly a lot of time had passed judging from the two women aged appearance, and despite being immortal also his lover looked touched deeply by the passing of time.

Much more aged than the girls, truth to be told... Had they really been just four years for the fixed captain? Was it somehow related to what had happened to him?

What had Jack and Gwen done now?

“And how much _do you know_ exactly?” Ianto barked to both his co-workers, unable to shake away the mistrust and the anger seeping through his voice.

“Calm down, all of you!” Rhiannon interrupted, after she had finally managed to get her voice back after the surprise of seeing her brother actually back among the livings. She knew that Ianto was far too emotional for his wellbeing and had a habit to say things he didn’t mean when angered or in distress, so the best thing to do was simply shutting him up. “First of all, let’s get out of here. Sitting on a coffin six feet underground will make anyone nervous.”

Ianto suspicious glare now was on his sister too, but he knew better than to contradict her, so he unwillingly let Jack help him out from his own grave and followed them few feet away from the graves. When they were all sitting in an open space, Ianto stared expectantly at the others again.

“So, how much do you know?”

“Not much actually.” Gwen said a little bit ashamed at their inability to find any clue on the matter despite their researches.

“You knew I was coming back,” Ianto reasoned, finding increasingly more difficult to not shout at them. “And you knew it was _now_ , how can it be ‘ _not much_ ’!”

“That” She explained hesitantly, stealing glances at Jack, who had taken a seat next to Ianto. “That was a little bit of cheating on your side.”

“ _My_ side?” Ianto asked, sounding almost offended.

“Well, not you as in _you,_ ” She tried again, now a little more confident since her friend appeared to at least be willing to listen. “But in _you_ as your future self. You came here to help us with some aliens three months ago.”

Ianto knit his eyebrows in disbelief. “Why on Earth would any Torchwood Three risk a temporal paradox for a bunch of aliens?”

“Because I-” Jack cut between them guiltily. “I kind of… dismantled it. More than once.”

“How- I mean…Why?” Ianto asked surprised, his voice wavering.

“I quitted. Left Earth. Came back. Left Cardiff. Came back. Not much room for our organized organization in this, no matter how much Gwen tried to put something together by herself. Besides, the rift seemed to have closed down forever until a few months ago.”

“Why?” Ianto repeated, dreading the answer now.

“Why did it close up?”

“Don’t joke around, Jack. You know what I mean.”

Jack smiled desolately at him and rested his hand on Ianto’s one.

“Doesn’t matter anymore, you’re back. You’re alive and we recently managed to rebuild Torchwood the way you knew it. We’re back in action and… When you are ready your old job will be waiting for you. Nothing needs to change if you don’t want to. Absolutely nothing.”

They stared at each other a long time, but none of them dared to spoke, both realizing that Jack’s words were referring to much more than just work.

“No more talking now, it’s late ok?” Rhiannon said, uncertainly cutting between the two of them. “You stink like a dead man, little brother. You need washing, changing and resting.”

She took out a small bag and left it in front of Ianto. “This should be enough for now. Nothing much: just some clothes, your favourite shampoo and shower gel, toothpaste and toothbrush, aftershave…”

“And you can stay with me at the hub until we find you a new flat.” Jack offered hopeful, following Rhiannon’s lead.

“Oh God” Ianto said, realizing something important only that moment. “I’ve got nothing left.”

Jack’s smile faded again and Gwen suddenly found the corner of her jacket really interesting. It was again Rhiannon the one that finally mustered enough courage to move next to her brother and encircle his shoulders, bringing him closer to her. Ianto flinched at the sudden source of warm, but didn’t try to escape her hug.

“Don’t be stupid, you’ve got _us_. We’re more important that a few things that had to go, aren’t we?”

Ianto nodded and finally let himself relax in his sister’s arms. She let him place his head on her shoulder and rested hers over his.

“When the Government released your things to our care, the flat had to go and so did the car. You know how the neighbourhood is, that gorgeous black Audi would have ended up no better than your company car.” Ianto winced in her arms, but she simply kissed his forehead tenderly and continued. “Those anyway were the only things gone, and the only part of your inheritance we actually used. Your money and most of your clothes and belongings are still untouched. We never had enough heart to throw everything away.”

“You needed the money more than me though, why keep it stocked?” He asked unsurely, feeling deeply regretful to presumably have to take it back from her.

Rhiannon smiled at him and tightened her hold on him. “You should be happy, you dumb sod, now you can buy everything back and I’m in the safe knowledge that your bank account would barely cry.”

Ianto raised an eyebrow at her and she simply shrugged. “Well, we had to check how much was there… God, Ianto, they certainly paid you well.”

“They know we are not going to see the end of it.” He deadpanned.

“Well, maybe you won’t see the end of it anyway, but now you can use it for a little bit longer, can’t you?”

He looked up at her, hesitation in his eyes. “Can I come home with you?”

Jack’s jaw dropped open in surprise hearing the proposition, but Rhiannon came to his rescue before he could make a case of it.

“You can visit me whenever you want. We’ll be all here for you… But right now you need to go back with Jack and let your man take care of you. Alright, you dumbass?”

Ianto glanced furtively at Jack, noticing his sad eyes filled with hurt. He tried to retreat more in his sister arms, but she let him go unmercifully and pushed him _not-too-gently_ towards Jack.

“Now, we all go to sleep.” Rhiannon ordered. “No draining talking tonight, you three leave it for tomorrow. Have I been clear? Gwen, you want a lift?”

Gwen looked at her friends, worried about the uncertain aura surrounding the two. She knew that if someone could understand how reviving felt and what it did to someone, that person was Jack, so she only had to keep trusting him. Besides Rhiannon was right: soulful talking could wait until after a good night of sleep.

“Thanks, Rhia. I’ll take your offer if you don’t mind.”

The two women left, glancing behind themselves to keep an eye on the two men for as long as they could, just in case they were suddenly needed again. Once alone with Jack, Ianto finally gathered enough courage to look again at his lover, guilt and doubts filling his eyes again.

“How was it for you?”

“Shouldn’t we follow your sister advice?” Jack’s voice was miserable and unsure, not certainly the one he would have expected from a man who had four years or more to make another life for himself.

“Jack…”

“Yeah, yeah…” Jack admitted, taking Ianto’s hand in his own. “I’d like to settle a few things between us right now too, but we can’t do that in a graveyard. Your sister was one hundred percent right on that. Let’s go back to the hub, the SUV is near.”

They walked in silence at a short distance, none of them daring to be the first to confront the other. As soon as they were inside and ready to take the road back to the bay though, Ianto yelped and stared at Jack puzzled.

“I had lost it! How did you manage to get the car back?”

Jack smirked, but kept his focus on driving the car. “I didn’t get it back. I had one made from scratch around four months ago. I remade the SUV, the hub… I wanted everything back the way it was. Last time we went to America, I realized I was still running away. So I thought about the only thing that could have made me feel alive again, something that would make me stop running away.”

“Torchwood?” Ianto said tentatively, not daring to hope that it was the wrong answer.

“You.”

A tiny little fragment of warmth made it through Ianto’s hearth, and he had to try his best to not show too much how he was pleased and frightened at the same time by Jack’s confession.

“Jack… How many years passed for you? You really look older.”

Jack smiled a sad smile, swallowing the lump forming in his throat.

“Only the four years I mentioned before. I wanted to find a place for me on Earth, hoped that I could at least see you again or something… But I ended up making things worse, so I fled and then a friend suggested in his own way that I had to try and be myself again. In the long run it didn’t work though. I discovered that I really hadn’t been ready to lose you. Not so early, not like that.”

“Was it... after you met that future me?” Ianto asked, consciously adding up to his guilt list as he wondered if he had more direct responsibilities in Jack’s inability to get over his death.

He had always wanted for his lover to never forget him, to hold his memory close to his heart, but he had never wished for Jack to end up completely wasted with grief. He had never actually thought that would be an issue altogether, since Jack never even told him that he loved him, not even during the few moments they talked before his death. Seeing his lover so worn out was too much to bear though, no matter how much he had craved to be loved deeply by the man.

“No, it was before.” The captain answered sincerely, lifting a weight from Ianto’s heart.

“Then…?”

“I wanted back what I had.” Jack explained, trying to focus on the road and not on his heart breaking. “My plan was to rebuild everything the way it was, come back to the graveyard and bring in the morgue what was left of you, so you could stay forever by my side.”

“Jack…” Ianto was at a loss of words on that argument. “What happened to you in these four years?”

“Well I told you about the first six months, but you wouldn’t remember the time I actually managed to get you, so… Let’s leave it, ok? After that, well, you know how I am when I don’t get what I want… I drink, have sex, search for adventures… But everything had lost its flavour. That’s what made me come back to Earth first and then Cardiff. Nothing actually changed. Not without you there with me.”

“I want to believe you, Jack, but it’s hard.” Ianto’s words were laced with sadness and regret, in a way not much different from the many times in which Jack had managed to royally mess things up and left his lover wondering about his place in the captain’s life. 

“Why’s that?” Jack asked, knowing that the moment had come. The moment to finally confront the doubts he had left Ianto with when they had died together in London.

“We were nothing Jack. What we _were_ didn’t have a name, what we _had_ didn’t have a name. You don’t even love me, even though I can assume from your words that you have sincerely missed me.”

Those words hurt Jack even though he was expecting them and he was conscious that Ianto had good reasons to think that. Four years of purgatory couldn’t erase his mistakes. He had promised to himself he wouldn’t do anything stupid again after The Year That Never Was, but in the end he still proved to be too slow catching up with his lover’s feelings as much as his owns.

“Do not cheapen my feelings for you, Ianto Jones.” He managed to say, his voice barely a whisper as he tried to keep it straight. “I know it’s scary to be back when you thought you were already dead, but… Eventually we’ll work it out together, no matter what you choose to do with us. If you still want me, we can be anything… everything. I want to play on your terms this time, no matter what they are.”

“Jack, I don’t want your pity and I don’t want you to feel like you have to right your wrongs nor do moral-wise stuff like that. I’m not your lost case. You had four years to move on, you don’t need to go back because I was left behind.”

“Have you listened to half of the things I said?” Jack cried out, tightening his grip on the wheel as he did his best to at least keep the car on the road. “I _couldn’t_ move on! I turned the hub into a damn mausoleum just because I missed you! Gwen had to swear that _you_ made me promise to make it alive again! The only thing that talked me out of my plan was she yelling at me how you had said that after being back from the death you wouldn’t want another grave.”

Silence filled the car, and Jack was sure he had said enough to get Ianto angry for the whole next week or so. If this was one of their normal arguments that would have been fine, but right now the only thing he felt like doing was to curl up in his bed and hold Ianto tight with no chance to let him go. To leave him brooding alone was not something he was willing to do at the moment.

“That sounds like me.” Ianto replied after a while, easing Jack’s worries.

“Damn sure it does! That’s why I believed it.”

Ianto stifled a laugh and Jack glanced at him, a smile appearing on his lips against his resolve to still look angry. The captain focused back on the road in front of him, letting melancholy fill his heart and words, despite his best attempts to sound neutral.

“I missed your laugh.”

Jack mentally swore, realising that his voice didn’t still sound as cool as he wanted.

“We laughed a lot together.” Ianto’s plain voice, seemed to hid in itself the same hurt and nostalgia that four years of grieving had carved in Jack’s.

“Because we were happy.”

“Because we joked and played a lot, actually.” Ianto corrected him with a bitter smirk, and then turned his head to look seriously at his lover. “But yes, we were happy when we were together. When you left, thousands of doubts kept killing me inside... but when we were together, you were only for me.”

Jack parked the SUV in the shadows of the Memorial, and took his chance to finally look at his lover directly in the eyes.

“I want that back Ianto. My feelings for you are the same and I gathered enough courage to even say it if you want me to. I don’t know how much you’ve left to live, but _as long as we live our life to the fullest day by day… Doesn’t an hour together have the same value of three months, and don’t three months have the same value of five hundred years?_ All the time you have left… I would be honoured if you gave it to me, no matter how much it is.”

“You’re not like this, Jack. You don’t do couples, you don’t do commitments.”

“Because it hurts!” Jack pressed on. “It hurts for me to lose everyone and I’m not just talking about people _dying_. My wife left me because she thought I was a monster… But you, you loved me and cared for me _even though_ you saw with your own eyes that I was like that… You’re smart, handsome, funny, you’ve great voice, you keep up with me whatever I do and whatever I ask… I’ve become dependent on you, on you presence, on everything that you are.”

Jack took Ianto’s hand in his own and lovingly caressed its back with his thumb, trying to breach through the mess that was left of their relationship with the small little gestures that had always made Ianto feel loved.

“When you were around, I kept searching for you and I know you noticed my eyes on you. When you weren’t, I thought of what we could do once we were alone and yes, no matter how many times _I_ told _you_ not to do it, _I_ ’ve always worried about where you went or if you were fine. I hated it each time you didn’t tell me where you were going or when you were out late. I might have been scared to say it aloud back then, but you _must_ know what name my feelings for you have.”

“But… my time is gone.” Ianto argued broken heart, and looked away from Jack to hide the tears flowing down his eyes. “You need to be free to do what you have to do, I shouldn’t be here stopping you.”

“My time has gone too, Ianto. So many times I’ve lost count.” Jack smiled at him and took his chin in his hand, bringing back up Ianto’s face so that they could see each other. “I shouldn’t be here as well.”

“We make a nice couple.” Ianto smiled sadly at him.

“Well, we are.” Jack returned the smile and leaned towards his lover to give him a kiss on his cheek, but Ianto retreated, still feeling too uneasy to accept even that small sign of affection.

“Ca-can I have that shower now? I still feel like worms are crawling on me, even though they were only outside the coffin.”

Jack nodded to him and they exited the car to finally reach the information centre. Once there, Ianto got a clearer idea of what Jack had meant calling the new base a mausoleum for him. Even though there were new cards, posters and updated flyers, everything was eerily identical to his old station. There were no distinctive signs that four years had passed, that changes had been made or that someone else had replaced him.

The main hub was just like tourist office. Different kinds of devices were lying scattered around and he could bet that some of the computers had been changed and updated, but the basic structure of it was essentially the same. He skirted off as soon as he could to have a look at the kitchen, both curious and worried about the changes his co-workers might have done, but there he found everything exactly how he remembered it, except for the shape of a pterodactyl painted on each side of his favourite brand coffee machine.

“We didn’t know how you would have liked it.” Jack explained, slowly joining him. “The kitchen was your domain, so we left this area like it was. We added the pterodactyl, though, Gwen said it would be cute to paint something there… And I suggested the pterodactyl, ‘cause… Well you like Myfanwy...”

“That was a nice idea.” Ianto saved him, his lost gaze melting into an amused one at Jack’s embarrassment. “A little weird, but nice.”

“C’mon, let’s get that shower.” Jack said snatching Ianto’s bag from his lover’s grip and taking his hand with his free one.

Due to the obviously awkward tension between them they made individual showers, but none of them complained as they laid together in Jack’s small bed, their bodies fitting together like no time at all had passed.

Ianto was still unsure about where they stood, not only after the 456, but also after all those years that Jack had lived without him. Too many things had been left unsaid to make him fully appreciate his lover’s proximity, but at the same time he needed to feel him and his familiar pheromones and his warmth, and he knew Jack needed this too.

Four years was a long time to stay dead and to keep it slow could maybe be the only thing that could really make them learn how to feel alive again.

At least for tonight.

**T.B.C.**

 


	3. Know me again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t dislike Gwen. I believe she’s what any woman can be: confused, childish and egoist, but also strong and caring. I felt like they all needed the chance to let everything out, so you might encounter the darkest side of the characters, who aren’t saints to begin with. This is a personal interpretation of why they did certain things in canon, but I don’t think I’m much far off the target.

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue bring Ianto back to Jack first.

 **Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY. Long deep soul drama. No Gwen Cooper-Williams got harmed during the writing of _this_ chapter.

 

Jack’s alarm clock ringed too early for his likings, even though he had settled it at 8:30 AM, giving him more than three hours of sleep when he usually didn’t need more than a couple.

The captain’s first instinct was to stretch his sore muscles, but he found his arms pleasantly trapped around someone else. It didn’t take much to his sleep fogged mind to identify the person as his Ianto. He tightened his embrace around his lover, fearing that it would be yet again just a dream, but the stifled groan he earned from his moving around erased all his fears at once.

Ianto automatically turned to face him in his arms and reached up to meet his lips in a sweet, sleepy kiss. Jack’s coherent thoughts didn’t make it past the realization that the Welshman wasn’t much conscious of his own actions before he eagerly returned the kiss, giving Ianto access as soon as he felt his tongue sensually probing his lips.

“Jack, ‘s too early.” Ianto mumbled drowsily as he kept kissing him, one hand burying itself in Jack’s hair, while the other wandered over his lover’s broad chest to tease him.

“Ianto, it’s already eight thirty in the morning.” Jack protested weakly, drugged by his lover’s kiss and seeking more of it.

What Jack had said to stop further worrying from his lover unfortunately made Ianto sit up hastily, sending Jack sprawled on his back, half out the small bed.

“Gwen must be already here! I’ll have to make her coffee before she-”

“Ianto, calm down.” Jack tried to make him see reason as he sat up. “Gwen will be in late, won’t she? Yesterday shift ended this morning, besides I delegated everything to UNIT for a couple of days.”

He caressed lightly Ianto’s arms the whole length, from wrist to his tense shoulders and left his hands there to relax his lover, randomly leaving a few kisses on his neck as he worked on his muscles and nerves. Ianto was already giving in to Jack’s impromptu seductive massage, when he suddenly realized that there was no reason on Earth why Jack would have left their work to UNIT or for Gwen to be at the hub if they had actually declared themselves on holyday, so he scanned his memories for fresh information.

“Wait, the 456!? And…” He said suddenly, his shoulders dropping as he remembered way more recent events. “Oh, God… I’m dead.”

Ianto hid his face behind his hands, but since he didn’t make a move to get away from him, Jack kept going his handwork.

“You _were_ dead, but now you’re back.” Jack said slowly, trying to sound reassuring. “And I wouldn’t say no to your coffee if you don’t plan to keep going what you started.”

Jack felt the daggers-like force of Ianto’s stare on him even though he hadn’t met his eyes. “You let me kiss you when you knew I wasn’t ready.”

Jack raised an eyebrow enquiringly and smirked at him, hoping to melt Ianto’s rage the way the only way he was left familiar with.

“Oh really?” He teased, glancing at Ianto’s groin. “You seem to me _hard_ ly not ready.”

“You can’t use my body against me, Jack.”

This time Ianto’s tone was serious, so Jack grudgingly let go of his shoulders.

“Sorry, I couldn’t stop myself. I had barely woken up myself… And I really missed you.”

“I didn’t know I was this good.” Ianto told him coldly, standing up. “I should consider make it a business then.”

Jack stood up and sighed. Perfect way to begin the day.

They dressed in silence and even more silently they slipped out of the dark bunker.

“Sleeping truce already ended?” Once out in the broad light of the office neon Jack tried to go for humour, but Ianto didn’t even think that he deserved an answer and instead he proceeded steadily to the kitchen, disappearing behind the coffee machine.

Despite the tension between them, Jack took the coffee-making routine as a good sign, so he busied himself with some little basic updates of Ianto’s files to bring him back to life _lawfully_ as much as physically. After almost half an hour in which Ianto made no sign of coming back to deliver a mug for him though, he started to get worried.

It might have been four years, but Jack remembered exactly how much it took to his lover to make coffee, and it was nowhere near this long. He wandered up to the kitchenette and found Ianto sat down in a corner, fighting tears. He cursed himself for leaving him alone all that time without checking, and in a few seconds he was at his side, holding him tight.

“It’s real Ianto… _this_ is real.” He cooed, rocking him in his arms. Ianto hid his face between Jack’s shoulder and neck, letting the other man kiss his head and grasp firmly the nape of his neck to keep him closer. “You’re back, Ianto. Back with me.”

“I’m scared…” Ianto confessed in a whimper.

“I know, I was too when I first discovered I was back. We are going to find out what happened and how, Ianto. Together.”

“Together?” He asked puzzled, tears eventually marrying his cheeks. “After all I said to you?”

“Ianto, I can understand how confusing this can be. For both of us. You have no reason to trust me except for your memories of four years ago, and about me… I wanted you back for so long, that now it’s difficult not trying to have what we had straight from the last moment we were together. We can start afresh if you want to, but I’ll always keep yearning for what we were, you must know that.”

Ianto snorted, but held him even tighter, feeling guilty as he noticed his tears dotting Jack’s shirt. A shirt he had never saw on him and that didn’t smell like his own as it usually did since the day he began taking their things to wash together.

“Shouldn’t this be reversed? Me trying to hold onto the old memories we shared and that for me are like yesterday, and you already fine, moved on with new lovers and new everything?”

Jack changed positions a bit, making their cheeks brush together.

“That’s because you have never been a blip in time Ianto Jones. I always held you in my heart and when I’ll lose you again, I swear to you that things won’t change, even though I managed to spend more time with you. If my immortal life is the price I had to pay to see you again here in my arms… Then the price becomes light in my eyes.”

“Don’t say this, Jack, you don’t mean it. A life like yours will be too much for everyone.”

“Yeah, and you have no idea how much I wanted to end it… Nevertheless it gave me you. I’ve been hopping around through time and space for a long time, but I doubt I would have had a chance to meet you otherwise.”

“An office boy from Cardiff.” Ianto drawled.

“A hero from Cardiff.” Jack corrected him with a sad smile, letting his lips trace the lines of Ianto’s jaw. “You’re a hero, my Romeo, believe me. You died trying to save everyone: you’re the hero, not me. I gave up everything I had left, everything I _was,_ out of grief. You would have been stronger than me, you would have kept doing the right things… You would have stopped me.”

Jack’s voice was a strangled cry near the end, his grandson’s cry still echoing in his ears.

“What happened after my death?”

“Alice managed to persuade the authorities that we could actually do the job they paid us for,” Jack confessed in a single breath. “And was rewarded by me sacrificing Steven to destroy the aliens.”

“Oh, God.” Ianto whispered, bringing his hand to his mouth as his eyes widened in horror. They lingered for a moment on Jack’s pained face, and then he freed himself from his lover’s arms to cradle him in his owns. “I’m here, Jack… I love you anyway, you know that, don’t you?”

Jack looked up at his lover with a pained smile and swallowed, tears threatening to roll from his eyes too. “I love you too, Ianto. Believe me, say it aloud may hurt… But not saying it at all when you already fell is way worse.”

Ianto held the man even tighter and Jack snuggled close to him, both of them relaxing in the comfort they gave to each other.

 

Gwen found them snoozing there some time later, still holding onto one another.

“You guys fell asleep here?” She teased. “I know Jack’s bed is small, but surely it must be more comfortable than the floor.”

The two men blinked a couple of times at her, realizing how they had shamefully fallen asleep again after their small confrontation. Gwen smiled motherly at them and held out her hands to help them up. They shared a mischievous grin and then they took a hand each to pull her down between them. She fell over the boys, but instead of hurling something at them in retaliation she took her chance to hug them both as they all began laughing.

“Now the loss of dignity is properly shared.” Ianto concluded, plainly satisfied.

“Well to the loss of dignity could always follow a threesome.” Jack teased, eliciting an eye roll from Ianto and a doubtful raise of eyebrow from Gwen.

“Am I in the middle of something?” Rhys questioned uncertainly, staring down at his wife and her co-workers.

“Scratch the threesome.” Jack corrected himself with a big happy smile. “Up for a foursome?”

Ianto and Rhys simply shook their heads good-naturedly, but Gwen actually looked at him seriously in the eyes.

“We have to talk, Jack, we can’t hold this off.” She said, and without waiting for his answer she marched silently to the conference room, followed by a puzzled Rhys and a resigned Jack, whilst Ianto took his chance to actually finish the coffee he had been brewing.

When Jack went back searching for him, he met his lover half-way with a trail full of mugs of the delicious liquid and some plates of biscuits.

“We had no breakfast in the end… I thought this could help, especially if I understood correctly what all this talking is about.”

Jack smiled at him and gave him a small peck on his lips, rejoicing when Ianto didn’t bolt away like the last time. “Your coffee always helps, and yeah, I fear you got the topic right.”

When all of them were seated in the conference room with their cup of coffee though, a dreadful silence fell over them. Gwen and Rhys sat one near the other, while Jack and Ianto took a seat opposite to them, Jack facing Gwen and Ianto facing Rhys. For the three co-workers the casual sitting arrangement was so symbolic it already made their stomach twist.

“I didn’t realize Rhys was going to be part of this,” Jack eventually said with a nervous laugh. “Does his part time stretch through the days off?”

Gwen gave him a _you-know-exactly-why-he-is-here_ smile and then lowered her eyes to the table.

“Ianto said there would be four of us back ‘ere today and somehow I didn’t think he meant Rhiannon.”

“Did I?” Ianto asked perplexed.

“Well” Gwen explained. “Your future self actually. He promised me we would have a chance to explain.”

“ _We_ being…?”

“Me and you.” She stated, still not taking her eyes off the point of the table she was staring at. “I know that I love Rhys and I know that Jack will always watch out for me… But I have no idea where working together has left us, Ianto. I thought I knew you, but as a matter of fact you told me only a bunch of lies.”

Ianto simply stared at her, disheartened, trying to not let his carefully hidden resentment have the best of him.

“It’s because I’m private, Gwen. You have to look _close_ to be aware of things. Even Owen did that in order to notice that I was sleeping with Jack, but you…” Ianto said, searching for the less hurtful way to say what he thought. “You didn’t even fucking notice I _never_ followed you guys when you went off for ice-cream. The real question here is: where does _this_ put _me_ in _your_ life, Gwen?”

“If I didn’t notice right away you could have told me, I can listen!”

“I-I-” Ianto stuttered, glancing at Rhys with the corner of his eye. “I’m not going to have this conversation with Rhys listening, Gwen. I don’t have your nerve.”

Rhys stared puzzled at Ianto and then at his wife, but they now seemed to only see one another.

“My _nerve_?” Gwen asked, her face a cold mask as she tried to hid her emotions.

“When Jack died the first time…” Ianto explained, swallowing uncomfortably at the painful memory. “I mean, when we saw it for the first time, after Owen shot him… We had all betrayed him. _All of us_ , Gwen! How could you bear to look at his blue lips, at his face void of colour and…and simply wait beside him! Like you were the mother or wife or friend that had never failed him!”

“What was I supposed to do, Ianto!?” She argued, her surprise crumbling through her blank façade. “He told me when I first joined, that everyone makes mistakes, but we have to live by them! _Right_ the _wrong_! I was the one who _knew_ for the longest time that he couldn’t die, and that made _me_ the one who would have trusted him the most to come back. I was just doing my _duty_!”

“I might have very well _hoped_ for the same thing even without the knowledge, have you ever thought about that?” Ianto’s eyes became even sadder and weary as he saw the realization dawning on Gwen right in front of his eyes.

“I kept fixing things in his office and his paperwork for the day he would return to us, but…” He continued lowering his eyes. “Each time I saw him dead it reminded me how much I had failed him. I failed the man who trusted _me_ to do the right thing, only because I saw the woman that _I_ used to trust telling me that everyone would have been saved if I opened it! Everyone, Gwen. What were my feelings if confronted with the life of thousands people. Including your Rhys.”

The real meaning of Ianto’s last statement lingered in the air between the two of them. Including Rhys, the only reason that stood between Jack and Gwen. Still it was not the always lingering and coldly calculated jealousy that came as a revelation to Gwen and left her at a loss of words.

Not only had she never thought that the reason her friends hadn’t waited by Jack’s side was the guilt for their betrayal, and not the lack of trust in Jack’s immortality, but she had also always thought that Ianto had simply hoped, all that time, to get Lisa back. Just like Owen had wanted to save Diane.

She would have never guessed it to be actually the same issue he and Jack ended up fighting over right before Thames house. Do everything he could to save everyone versus sacrificing some to save all the others. What had made Ianto betray Jack’s trust had been nothing else than what eventually managed to get him killed. It hurt knowing that she could have never learnt something so important about her friend without this second chance.

“Ianto, that time… in the end no one died.” She whispered warmly, wishing that she could mend the wound somehow. “Rhys is still here, Jack is still here, the Earth… is still here.”

Ianto shook his head. “Only because Jack sacrificed himself! God, Gwen, I cried my eyes out hidden in his office, struggling because I wanted to have half of the courage you were showing to be at his side. Nevertheless I was only the damn treacherous tea-boy.”

He was at the verge of tears, but he wasn’t going to let them out. After all everything was already in the past… No matter how much it hurt each time he remembered Jack lying cold and lifeless in the morgue.

“That’s why I said never again.” Ianto continued, before his courage could falter. “And that’s why I forgave him when he came back from his trip with the Doctor. I forgave him the way he had forgiven me for my betrayals. I repaid my debt and then tried to become someone who was actually _worth_ to stay at his side when he died, so I could protect him without feeling guilty. I _earned_ my place next to him.”

He took a deep breath, and looked back at Gwen, trying to not break the eye contact with her.

“Because I might admire your cold blood and how well you deal with your feelings to get the work done, I _really_ do. I know Torchwood needs this… However I’m not like you, Gwen. I need to set things right and well categorized before moving on. It’s hard for me to leave everything to unpredictable chances, no matter how much I believe in them.”

“We’re different, but that’s good for Torchwood, isn’t it?” Gwen countered, looking at him with pleading eyes. “This is why I want for us to be a little more open about what we feel. I realized that I did it with Tosh, Owen… I keep doing it with Jack, but something always stopped me to do the same with you.”

Ianto had to snort at that: Gwen’s lack of understanding of the basics of her own mind was simply unnerving. He realized that they were all broken and tainted souls, that no one of them had any right to judge the others and that they had to live and work despite knowing what they had done in the past to one another or to other people.

However, _this_ was a peculiarity of Gwen’s character that had always made him shut himself from her, because he knew that right there laid the grounds for her crush over Jack switching on and off. If he could forgive her for always forgetting him and putting him in the background, he couldn’t forgive her for acting like she was Jack’s most loved or trusted one, plainly _ignoring_ that _he_ was the one that shared his bed.

It was purely irrational, but he couldn’t stop himself from feeling uneasy each time he noticed her behaviour when she thought that she was alone with Jack. Realizing that they rarely did it on purpose or that he had no right to voice his opinion on the matter didn’t made him feel better.

“Because I didn’t exist, Gwen. _I_ was the one deleting the data about Torchwood you wrote on your computer right after Jack retconned, you-” Gwen’s eyes widened in shock, and Ianto couldn’t help groaning at her reaction. He had been the only one left at the base, who else could it have been? “You didn’t even saw fit to mention the butler. I became a more important part of your daily routine only when I became Jack’s unofficial boyfriend slash official shag.”

Jack tried to butt in, but he was stopped by a flick of their hands.

Ianto’s lies had always covered things nicely, but now that the small ones floated on the surface, if they didn’t solve this soon it would have been too hard to keep working together. The trust had already been broken and had revealed how fragile it was the link that tied them once they put Jack aside, especially now that Tosh and Owen weren’t there to mend the fractures.

“You get to talk about that later, Jack.” Gwen explained him. “First… Ianto’s right, we can’t do this if I’m not honest with Rhys.”

Ianto and Jack looked at each other both worried and unsure about her intentions. How much was Gwen willing to admit? Now the matter didn’t just include the four of them, but also her daughter, and all the problems they had paled in front of the future and happiness of the child.

Rhys raised an eyebrow and stared at his wife, only marginally reassured by her previous declaration of love, especially since Jack and Ianto’s reaction made clear that he wasn’t going to like it.

“Rhys, I-I had a thing for Jack awhile back,” She began, her hands trembling on the table. “I actually never acted much on it, but I surely tried to get some reactions from him more than once.”

His world crumbled, but also lightened up a little bit. It hadn’t been only a matter of privacy and different personalities that had kept Ianto and Gwen apart, but good old jealousy. They were after the same man. It was so obvious thinking about it now, that he wondered how he could have missed it.

“I thought I got over it when we finally married. I knew marrying you was the right thing to do, it was what I _wanted_ the most, and… well Jack and Ianto’s fling never actually got official, but it had been stable for at least half a year or so, they went to dates, spent an awful lot of time together…”

Gwen’s upset voice surprised her as much as it hurt Rhys. It wasn’t just ‘ _I had a thing for Jack_ ’, it was more likely ‘ _I have a thing for Jack_ ’, no matter how she tried to put it in the past.

“And despite all that I still didn’t imagine how much Ianto’s death would have crushed him.” Gwen continued, pretending to be oblivious of her husband’s disappointment. “Seeing it made me think that… maybe even before me choosing you, I never was an option in Jack’s plans. I felt played, like it had never been my call. And I wanted it. I wanted to feel again what I thought I felt when I first joined Torchwood.”

Gwen searched for Jack’s eyes and found the captain staring at her with an unreadable expression on his face. She knew she was close to losing everything she held close to her heart. The three most important men of her life could leave her because of what she was confessing, but she couldn’t keep that inside anymore.

“But even in bloody America Jack barely considered me. Even without Ianto around, he still preferred casual flings or someone else, but not me. I know its egoistic pretending to have someone chasing me only to have back a chance I didn’t want to take in first place… I still believed it possible anyway. Does it make me such a bad person?”

“What if Jack had been willing Gwen?” Rhys asked her coldly, dreading her answer. “Would you have left me and fled away with ‘im?”

Gwen shook her head and tried to reach for his hand, but he moved it away.

“That’s not it, sweetheart…” She tried again.

“Wait.” Jack interrupted, looking at both of them sternly. “I want to say my part too before you answer him.”

His eyes were so dangerous that they simply swallowed and nodded.

“I liked you from the very beginning, Gwen. I already told you: you’re brilliant and I admire the way you work with things as much as I admired Ianto’s, Tosh’s and Owen’s. And _this_ is why I can realize _how_ you keep doing what you do the way you do. I always told you to take care of what you had with Rhys, to not let it drift. I said so because I care a lot for you, I felt a connection from the first moment I saw you. I like you. Later on you _became_ a sister, a best friend who would always be at my side, fighting for the things we want to protect. This is what I feel for you _right_ _now_.”

“Don’t think that I simply flirted with you to confuse you, because I’m not like that. I did care for you enough to understand that it wouldn’t have worked between us. I can be interested in lots of people at the same time and my feelings for them are different for each one of them, but this doesn’t make them fake. I can’t even say I love Ianto in the same way I loved my wife. There’s no better or worse, just… different.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack finished, trying to sound as sincere as he could. “This is just the way I am. I lived here a long time and I’m willing to adapt to some things, but I still am from a different culture. We feel and do things differently. I’m sorry I confused you, but my crush and my feelings for you weren’t fake, they were just _not enough_ to choose you over Ianto or to believe that I would make you happier than Rhys. I moved on.”

“Different doesn’t mean wrong after all.” Ianto whispered at his side as his mouth tightened in what was supposed to be a smile to comfort his lover.

Jack looked back at him, smiling warmly back at him. They had fought a lot because of their differences, but he knew that Ianto understood and accepted him anyway. That was precisely what had made him fall so hard for his young employee.

“I know you understand, Ianto, that’s why _you_ are my fixed point. I already told you more than once… You could never be just a blip in time. We understand each other too well… and I promise I’ll show you that from now on.”

Jack’s attention was all focused on Ianto, hoping that this time finally he could say the right words to finally convince the man he would never love someone as much as him.

“When I’m with you I feel a proper human again.” Jack continued. “ _Gwen opened my eyes with her way to fight to protect her love life and then family despite working at Torchwood, but it was you that gave me the hope I could become someone I might like. You made me believe I could be good enough for someone, so that I could have what she had for myself._ ”

“So, it’s all about need, isn’t it? Not about feelings.” Gwen cut in drily, hating with every inch of her being the way she felt hearing the same hurtful words twice. If even without his memories, he had told Ianto the same words he had said three months before to Future Ianto, there was no chance that Jack didn’t mean them. “You love me, but you need Ianto and I need Rhys? What kind of explanation is that!? You and I are the monsters and they are the ones who can make us human with their beatin’ ‘eart!? This is why we can’t work this out!?”

Being called a monster hurt Jack deeply, but ever more so it hurt seeing how Gwen now considered herself one too. Torchwood had carved a deep scar in the heart of the curious justice-follower woman he had first met, a wound that he had obviously barely acknowledged.

“Gwen, there’s nothing to work out.” Jack tried to explain. “You love Rhys and you always will. I saw how much you do! When you thought he died you went crazy with grief! Each time he was in danger you would have gotten yourself killed to protect him! You defied _me_ because you wouldn’t retcon _him_! That’s not just guilt because he’s nice to you, Gwen, don’t fool yourself.”

Jack paused and took a deep breath. “Because no guilt stopped you to be nasty to Ianto, and you know that sometimes you have done it.”

“It wasn’t on purpose… Not always.” Gwen protested, staring down at her hands guiltily. “I usually realized some time afterwards that what I told him could have upset him…”

She then looked back at Ianto, her face severe and unyielding. “Because he never says a thing. Was it awful saying _Gwen, shove it_? Tosh was way more honest with her half said sentences, at least I knew how she felt about things.”

“We have to work together.” Ianto’s face was as void of emotions as he could make it, but not even that could hide the guilt he felt.

“That’s not an excuse! We need to be honest with each other, so that we can deal with our problems!”

“But I can’t!” He cried. “That’s why things were getting better after your marriage! Because you stopped being a nasty jealous third wheel and I could finally work with you without pretending I could stand the way you were after my boyfriend! I really believed that those flirts were finally case closed after that damn dance!”

“You could never say you were boyfriends… because Jack never had the courage to tell you, did he? And he stole glances at me when he was dancing with you, I saw that myself!”

“I was wondering if you were ok!” Jack cut in, before Ianto had a chance to retort something he would regret. “I did not know if you were sure about the wedding, if you had actually realized who and why was at the top of your list, if you would stay with Torchwood. Besides I knew you were still confused about me, but I you didn’t seem to realise that you would have to let me go after that day. Moreover…”

Jack took a long breath and lowered his eyes. “You look a lot like Lucia, so much it hurt for me seeing you in that wedding dress and not knowing if that was really what you wanted. I didn’t want your marriage to fail like mine.”

“So what? You let me marry Rhys because in case we ended up marring each other instead, I would have left you like she did? Or because you believed you wouldn’t make me happy? Let _me_ decide about it!”

“There was nothing to decide!” Jack shouted. “You don’t love me as a husband, you love what I represent in your life! I gave you the thrill that your life was missing. You changed your mind back again when I came back only because you were bored out of your mind, and that’s my fault Gwen! There’s a reason why we retcon people who leave Torchwood when they don’t die on their own!”

“And about my feelings,” He concluded wearily after a small moment of silence. “I already told you I don’t love you the way I love Ianto. I don’t see a future for us now in a love relationship, and truth to be told maybe I never did, I’m sorry. Something in the back of my mind always made me feel like it was wrong with you.”

“But you would have _sex_ with me.” She protested.

“I could be willing to play and have sex with lots of people, Gwen, but lately the offer was about joining me and Ianto for a little bit of fun between consentient people. There hasn’t been a me and you alone in that for a long time. At the beginning I might have considered, but then things became serious between you and Rhys and then between me and Ianto. I got to know you, to _trust_ you… and I never play with my friends feelings. I learnt my lesson after John.”

“John Hart… He was right about a lot of things…” Gwen considered, eyeing dangerously Jack. “He loved you and you abandoned him.”

“It was an arrangement, it’s not my fault he fell in love.” Jack protested. “And anyway… I was a different man back then, a man I didn’t like at the time and I don’t like now. He fell in love with him, but that me died hundreds of years ago.”

“We began as an arrangement too.” Ianto’s weak protest caught Jack’s attention anyway.

“This is different, Ianto, believe me. John and I were trapped, instead you and I chose to be together. I’m not joking when I say I love you… I really _do_ love you. The kind of love that will destroy me when you’ll be gone. It already has.”

“So you won’t grieve if you lost me!?” Gwen cut in, broken-heart.

“Of course I would grieve!” Jack argued, surprised at the question. “Like I grieved for Tosh and Owen, even more! They are still in my heart with all the people I cared for… That’s why I couldn’t look at you anymore after losing Ianto. You were the only one left and I had no intention of seeing you dying like them. I came back all the same though, because I really can’t live without friends and love, no matter how much I try. I had already sworn myself I would never fall in love with someone again after Lucia and look where I’m now.”

“When I was trapped in the forties with Tosh,” Jack explained calmly, his eyes falling on his own hands, now resting in front of him on the table. “I had the chance to meet the man I stole my name from. It was the day before his death and before my new life as him. I told him to not leave things undone. That made me realize how much I was denying myself, nonetheless I felt pressured to follow my own advice only after going away with the Doctor. Losing everything I was fighting for made me realise what were the things that mattered. How adventures had lost their appeal if I had no one to come back to tell them to.”

“Someone to come back to…” Gwen told him wearily. “You said you came back for him, for us, for me… What was the truth, Jack?”

“I came back because I missed the team _I chose_ , because I wanted to set things right with Ianto since I realised that even though we were both in pain, I kept taking without giving anything back. I knew he deserved better bedside manners… and also better inside-bed manners.” He added with a short lived smirk, remembering the banter his team had with Beth at the time.

“I also came back _for_ you… Because of you, because you reminded me I had a heart, because I was still wondering if things would have worked out between the two of us somehow. Just, after that… the more I thought about my coming back later, the more I realized what I missed more, what I needed… _who_ would bring my heart with him definitely when death would take him away.”

“Ianto wasn’t a second choice, Gwen” He finished, looking at her in her eyes. “And neither was Rhys for you. We’ve chosen them well, above all the others.”

Gwen lowered her eyes, trying her best not to cry, whilst Ianto simply rested his head on Jack’s shoulder as his lover encircled his arm around his shoulders.

“Gwen,” Rhys said slowly, his voice void of emotions echoing in the silence. “Can you answer me now?”

She nodded and then took a deep breath, drying with her sleeve the tears that fell from her eyes.

“I thought about it many many times and in the end… No, I wouldn’t have left you. It would have stayed an office fling at the very best. Jack is right, the way I love him is different from the way I love you and we both need more than _run-away-from-reality_ sex.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel myself deprived in the sex area.” Jack protested as he glanced at Ianto, trying to lighten the mood a bit.

“Neither do I.” She replied, the corner of her lips barely twitching upwards.

“And it feels so warm and so right when you hold me…” She continued staring at Rhys with big lovingly eyes. “Everything that’s bad, wrong or confused in my life disappears… as if by work of magic.”

Rhys looked at her intently, considering her words. “That was a lot to keep inside. For all the three of you. No wonder you were always in danger of losing it.”

“I pity you lot.” He continued, staring at turn at all of them.

They looked away, knowing that they couldn’t expect less from Rhys. They hadn’t been honest with him and even now they were covering things up, like Gwen’s fling with Owen. They should all be ashamed with themselves. She surely felt ashamed, as much as she feared that Rhys’s pity could mean the definite end of their relationship.

“But I forgive you.” He concluded much to everyone’s surprise. “I forgive you all. Thanks for finally telling me.”

Gwen let out the breath she didn’t know was holding and threw her arms around her husband. “I love you… I’m so sorry, Rhys. I’m so sorry… You’re too good to me.”

“Yeah yeah, I know. You should make me poetry.” Rhys joked, as he held her tight and caressed her back to comfort her.

When the hug ended, Gwen took a deep breath and looked at her co-workers. “And what about us? Are we going to be ok?”

“I don’t know, but _everything is possible if your heart is in it_.” Ianto answered, trying for a warm smile. Gwen felt an eerie sense of déjà vu hearing again the same words Future Ianto himself had told her. “We can build up the personal trust again, if you want. I’m in for a long series of new beginnings, one more won’t kill me. Again.”

Jack tightened his grip on Ianto’s shoulders, but didn’t protest further. If his lover could joke about his own death then there were good chances of him healing quicker than he thought.

Gwen smiled at them and then she focused back on Jack. “What about you?”

He smiled warmly. “It’s fine with me, Gwen. I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer about this from the beginning… But I didn’t realize how things were myself. I would be honoured if you could still think of me as your best friend.”

She smiled and nodded to him. “Then we’re all set. So… What are we going to do? We go all together chasing the last weird case Andy left me with?”

“Go home.” Jack told her sternly, but with a warm smile on his lips. “Stay with Rhys and Anwen, enjoy your family, stitch up what cracked during this conversation. Take your time. You have to give yourself time to forgive yourself… And to forgive us too.”

Gwen nodded and she stood up, followed by Rhys. Before going, she stopped to look back at them, trying to manage a true smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Working on the first… But already done the second. See you tomorrow guys.”

When Jack and Ianto were finally alone, they both took a deep breath and let it out loudly, leaning on one another for support as they felt the tension leave their bodies.

“I really thought this would have destroyed us. It went better than I hoped.” Ianto considered.

“Well, what doesn’t kill you fortifies you.”

Ianto had to raise an eyebrow at that. “I’m not sure that’s the correct way to phrase it, sir. Shouldn’t it be ‘ _What doesn't kill you makes you stronger_ ’?”

Jack simply shrugged. “Lucia used to say it like that. I guess she translated it straight from Italian.”

It was unusual for Jack to share personal snippets of his former family so freely and Ianto didn’t dare to hope that his lover was finally opening up to him. He could try to follow the topic though, to see actually how much the captain was willing to share.

“How are things with Alice, Jack?”

“They aren’t.” Jack answered with a sigh. “I killed her son. There’s nothing I could do to make up to her.”

“Have you even tried?”

“I don’t want to hurt her with my presence.” He cut short, so Ianto simply nodded and stored the information away for later, trying to find a way to change the subject.

“You know, it still seems so strange that I’ve been dead for so long. The 456 to me _really_ feels like yesterday.”

Jack held his lover from behind, and left a light kiss on the nape of his neck.

“For me, too. The only difference between us is that I had to live through how the world had changed and you still don’t know how things are.”

“We’ll have to change that.” Ianto stated, knowing pretty well that Jack wouldn’t want to let him out in a world four years in the future so easily.

“I thought we had a matter of feeling alive to solve first.” Jack said, his hands roaming freely over Ianto’s body. His fingers found the buttons of his lover’s shirt and he deftly began undoing them, as he teased the plains that lay under the soft material with his hands.

Ianto gave in and let himself fall in his lover’s embrace, searching behind himself for something he could grip.

“This position feels good, but I’d like to touch you too after all this time. You think that’s possible?”

“Back to my bunker?” Jack proposed suggestively.

“Always”.

**T.B.C.**


	4. Aliens in Cardiff

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood and Doctor Who or the Addams family, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue bring Ianto back to Jack first.

 **Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY. Eleven (Twelve?). No general UNIT General got harmed during the writing of _this_ chapter. Some drama in the end, but mostly  crack. Maybe the silliest thing I ever wrote in my entire fanfic-writer life.

 

After almost two hours, Jack and Ianto had finally felt enough _alive_ to leave the hub and enjoy the pale sun Cardiff had to offer. After some debating, they decided that even though going to visit Rhiannon was among the first things on their _to-do_ list, it wasn’t actually the top one.

Since Jack had left the rift-monitoring to UNIT, there would be no chances of work-related excuses in case she insisted on them staying overnight. They both agreed that the couch would be pretty damn comfortable, but they also realised that they would never survive a whole night together without taking things further.

That’s why they decided that it would be more sensible to use their afternoon off to help Ianto adjust to the new Cardiff. For someone who prided himself on his local knowledge –no matter what Gwen thought that meant– it would be a lot to take in, so they had to go through it little by little.

Jack began summing up some main historical facts happened over the last few years while they ate in the same posh French restaurant near the Memorial, where Rhiannon’s unwilling secret agent had seen them.

Ianto had to wonder if Susanne-The-Friend would be lurking around to play spy for his sister again, but his concern about ‘ _being seen_ ’ left him as soon as he let himself being charmed by the mundane news that he had always liked devouring, and the delicious view of Jack Harkness in a waistcoat.

After lunch, they decided on an essentials shopping tour, basically consisting in buying different kind of coffee brands, biscuits and chocolate for the hub and some new clothes for Ianto. Passing by an ice-cream parlour, Jack pleaded his boyfriend enough to actually get to sit at one of the tables outside to take some for himself. Obviously Ianto raised an eyebrow at his choice of snack as he ate a big piece of his own cake.

“How’s your cake?”

Ianto opened exaggeratedly his mouth as he gulped down a forkful of it and moaned at the flavour loud enough for Jack to hear him. “Absolutely delicious. Welsh cakes are the best.”

Jack swallowed at the display, realizing how he wasn’t in the mood for ice-cream anymore.

“Give me a bite?” He asked giving Ianto his best pout.

“Of course. When we go back at the hub I’ll bite you as much as you want.” Ianto teased, making his boyfriend growl.

“How about a fair trade?” Jack proposed, but Ianto simply grimaced, eyeing the ice-cream with disgust. “Oh, c’mon! It wouldn’t give you headaches if you ate it slowly.”

Ianto pretended to ignore him and focused back on his cake, whilst Jack groaned and searched his plate for something tradable. His eyes fell on the top cherry he had been saving for later and smirked wickedly, thinking about how much fun they‘d had with that kind of fruit in the past. No better time like the present to try that again, then.

“What about this? I remember you like cherries.” Jack teased, wiggling his eyebrows.

Ianto snorted at him, vaguely considering Jack’s farfetched exchange. There were good chances it would bring a little bit of fun if he played it well, especially since his lover had left it hanging right in front of him while he waited for an answer.

Too easy to play.

He smirked at Jack and took the cherry between his teeth, taking care to let the fluids overflow slowly and colour his mouth bloody red. As soon as he noticed his boyfriend’s eyes widen and his mouth open slightly in full appreciation, he took the cherry with his hand and ate it properly, taking care to leave out the core.

“You…Will pay this.” Jack said slowly, breathing heavier than usual.

“No problem with me,” Ianto answered nonchalantly, taking another forkful of cake and leaving it hanging halfway between them. “But I thought you wanted to try Welsh before I paid for your ice-cream.”

Jack smirked and took the whole fork in his mouth. He wasted a whole second too much to consider how the cake was truly good, and then focused back on his harassing boyfriend.

“I would suggest _me_ paying for the snacks, and then, well…” He teased. “If you allow me, I’d like to try a bigger bite off _another kind_ of Welsh. You know, the cake alone wasn’t Welsh enough.”

Ianto smirked and let go any pretence of innuendo.

“Naked hide and seek would be fair play? Thirteenth version?”

“Wouldn’t get through it.” Jack had to admit as he reached for his lover’s chin. “Want you now.”

“Heading back to the hub, already?” Ianto asked, already feeling heat running through his body.

“No better time than this.”

Jack leaned in for a kiss and Ianto was already closing his eyes to savour it better, when Jack’s mobile rang. Jack grimaced, holding it with hate that suddenly became utter revulsion as he read who the incoming call was from.

“You should answer that, it could be important.” Ianto evenly advised him, noticing the words _UNIT_ on the screen. Jack did just that, using so much strength that he almost got the answer button clogged-up.

“This has better be an alien invasion.” Jack growled.

“ _We know that you and your comrade at arms are simply gallivanting around, captain Harkness! You should be the one currently dealing with the Weevils!_ ”

“Hello to you too, Colonel Whatever-Was-The-Name. Look, I asked cover up for a day of holiday for me and my staff, what were we supposed to do aside ‘ _gallivanting’_ around? Do I need to explain the meaning of _holiday_ to you?” Jack retorted, annoyed at the stupid protests coming from UNIT.

Since they had discovered that some of Torchwood devices had ended up in UNIT possession three months before, things had been tense between the two groups, and since the Crown appeared to be on Torchwood side even thought the Government rooted for UNIT, Jack was sure that this was pure and simple retaliation.

“ _We all thought you had better reasons for it! You and that police girl of yours are supposed to keep yourself professional!_ ”

Jack knew for a fact that UNIT was well aware that he and Gwen were going to use the holiday to hang around with whoever they wanted, as much as they recognized that Torchwood was far from professional material.

“Now, Colonel, you’ll get me the General. NOW.” His tone was so irritated, that the Colonel lost all his will to stand by his orders to deal with Torchwood and fled to search for the General, leaving Jack to a presumably long waiting.

“Weevil hunting…” Ianto considered almost to himself, taking another bite of his cake. “Doesn’t sound too bad.”

“What d’you mean?” Jack asked suspiciously as he dug hastily in the remaining ice-cream.

“It has been a long time since we went hunting together. Might be nice.”

As weird as it sounded, Jack had to admit he had missed it too. Weevil hunting with Ianto was a double-adrenaline full immersion.

“I thought you wanted _a feel alive_ tour today, not a _risk your newly reacquired life_ one.”

“What makes you feel more alive than that?” Ianto argued back with a wink.

Jack shared his lover’s feelings on the matter actually. He had ended up living in danger only to feel alive again too after all the deaths around him and all the years of dull waiting for the Doctor. A waiting that now had turned out to be even longer as he couldn’t do much more than hanging around until his death.

“You sure you’re up to it?”

“Don’t treat me like a glass doll only because I died once. You know I never had problems with Weevils, Thames House was something else entirely. We had no time to prepare ourselves properly for it.”

Jack smiled at him and nodded.

“So…” Ianto tried to change the topic. “What’s up with UNIT?”

“They’re being jerks, nothing out of the ordinary. I personally scared their General for life some time ago while I was making the hub restored, you know? He dared to mention you… Not bad mouthing actually, but it just… Well, let’s say I snapped at him. Quite violently. I believe he thinks high of you, truth to be told. He said himself that if you had been around, he couldn’t have done it.”

Ianto stared at Jack, trying to unravel the riddle, but he had so many things going on in his head at the moment that he thought that he had better let it go. If it was something important, Jack would have surely told him the details sooner or later.

“If he really liked me so much… Why don’t you give him the good news?” Ianto’s eyes glimmered with pure mischief.

Jack stared at Ianto with his spoon hovering in front of him full of ice cream and his mouth open for a while, and then a big evil smirk spread on his lips as realization dawned on him.

“Ianto Jones, you’re wicked.”

The General finally answered the phone, already barking and shouting.

“ _Harkness! You’ll deal with those Weevils, now! You’ve barely been back in action three-_ ”

“It’s ok. We changed our minds.” Jack interrupted him, unexpectedly cheery.

“ _Oh_.”

“But this will cost you, since you promised us back up and then you backed off.”

“ _What do you-_ ”

“Our archivist is back.”

Jack could swear that he heard the General swallow.

“ _You mean you got another one._ ” The General tried to reason, worried about the implication of Jack’s statement.“ _He will need time to-_ ”

“Oh, no. Believe me or not _he_ is back. I’ll send Rhys to collect everything that’s ours tomorrow morning. Now I’ve got to go, sorry… Weevil date.”

Jack closed his mobile completely satisfied, left the money for their food with the waitress and took eagerly Ianto’s hand in his.

“So… We go back to the hub, leave your things there, get you a gun, check the sighting location on the radars and then… Let’s go hunting!”

“Wait!” Ianto complained and tried to slow down his over excited lover. “I don’t have an active gun licence.”

“You have it. I took care of it and everything else when you were, well… ‘ _making coffee_ ’ this morning.” Jack trailed off, using his free hand to draw the quotation marks in the air to emphasise how Ianto had not quite been making coffee at the time.

“Oh.” Ianto said, his mood sobering.

“You’re fine now?” Jack asked a little bit worried. “You just came back from death, you have a four years delay to catch up, and… Well, I’ve never been the best boyfriend.”

“It’s fine Jack. At least I’m not stuck in the middle like Owen was. Four years is a long time, but it will be easier than having to start everything from scratch. I have the basics.”

“And… Well, what about me? We never got over what happened during the 456.”

“You were under a lot of stress during the children ordeal,” Ianto said, closing up the space between them. “I can’t blame you if you kept snapping at me. Our work is stressful, fights are bound to happen.”

Jack swallowed hard hearing his cheerless tone, and tightened his grip on his boyfriend’s hand.

“That’s why I wanted you to talk to me.” Ianto continued, his voice firm and his eyes fixed on Jack, regarding him with sadness, but also with love. “I might have less than fifty years to share with you, but I can play as a decent pit stop in your life. I can’t cleanse your soul for the future, but I could help you coming to terms with the past.”

“It’s hard for me to do it.” Jack said, lowering his head to hide his embarrassment as a wide smile appeared on his face. “But I could try.”

Ianto smiled warmly at him, closing the space between them even more, his sadness all gone hearing his boyfriend’s words. His boyfriend. Jack had officially admitted that he was his boyfriend. It really had a nice sound, even better than he thought. So nice actually, that he really couldn’t remember why he was so scared about saying it aloud or admitting the relationship to his sister.

“It’s all I ever asked you.”

Jack leaned in to kiss Ianto’s cheek, and then both of them disappeared together in the direction of the hub laughing.

 

Not much time later, a dishevelled, skinny man wearing a bowtie appeared at the edge of a nearby alley. He was clenching tightly a weirdly shaped device in his hands. The tool was clearly made of scraps, but even though a fork, a couple of knives and a spoon were peeking out from the edges of the mess, the machine seemed to be somehow working… just not in the way it was supposed to.

Its steady beeping and violent trembling stopped dead as soon as he exited the dark alley, so the Doctor just collapsed, disheartened, on the concrete, pouting.

“This is _unprecedented_ , I’m a genius! Damn me for leaving Clara to her own devices, I could have used a hand here.” Something came back to his mind and he grimaced. “No, actually not. Anyway.”

He searched around himself just in case what he was looking for was actually there, under his nose, but he only noticed a young waitress staring at him, raising an eyebrow at his weird behaviour. Before the girl could ask if everything was ok he stood up, took some dust away from his mismatched garments and looked at her straight in the eye with a big, innocent smile.

“You wouldn’t have seen something unusual around here, wouldn’t you?” He asked, but before she could even try to answer, he turned his back to her, ready to go away. “No of course not. Who will notice something in bloody Cardiff? You got used to Jack after all.”

The girl simply stared at him surprised and whispered “Actually no.”

The Doctor angled his head to the left as he walked away, glad she had proved his point.

“You see? No point losing time asking.” He stopped abruptly as a thought occurred him. He leaped back in front of the girl, who jumped slightly in panic.

“Do you know a place where I can make a phone call? Forgot my mobile in the T.A.R.D.I.S., I mean in my car, I mean in this city maybe you could actually know what a T.A.R.D.I.S. is, but it’s safer call it a car anyway. You know, now nobody calls me anymore, well, not for chitty-chatty reasons anyway.”

The girl raised an eyebrow at him and eyed him suspiciously as to say _‘Guess why?’_ , but in the end she graciously pointed him to a phone cabin across the road.

“Good kid, I guess I should say thank you.” He said, and without actually saying thank you he run towards the phone box, leaving the poor waitress to shake her head in discomfort at his behaviour.

As soon as he reached his goal, the Doctor took out his screwdriver and tinkered with the phone receiver, so that he could make his call without being charged with money -which he didn’t have-and that he could get who he wanted without actually dialling the correct number –which he also didn’t have.

Luckily the trick never got old, regardless of the technology involved.

“Hello? I’m the Doctor!” He said cheerfully as a voice answered at the other end of the phone. “Yeah… Oh my God to you too. Need the General, a General… Not a general General, mind me, just a general UNIT General. Lost track of the names.”

It was a matter of seconds before the call was promptly switched to the General’s office.

“ _Glad to hear about you again Doctor, but let’s hope this is quick. We’re extremely busy at the moment._ ”

“Why?” The Doctor said conversationally. “Are you planning to destroy another alien race? No, wait, I’m sorry. That was Torchwood.”

There was a growl at the other end of the phone, but the Doctor simply ignored it. Some Generals liked him, some Generals hated him and, as much as he knew, the same love-hate relationship also applied for the UNIT-Torchwood association.

“Weeeell, I’ve been tracking a powerful flow of energy. I’m still not entirely sure what it actually is, but I keep losing track of it. I was wondering if you knew something? _Did_ something?”

“ _Powerful energy?_ ” The General asked thoughtful. “ _The one by the graveyard, you mean?_ ”

“Yeah! You see? You _can_ be useful, that’s news! Not sure if bad or good, but news anyway!”

The Doctor could hear the General snort. Oh yeah, not even teasing UNIT heads became old.

“ _We sent someone to check that last night, but there was nothing unusual there._ ”

“Nothing unusual? A tomb disappeared!” The Doctor protested loudly.

“ _No tomb was missing when we checked,_ ” The General reasoned evenly. “ _The things might not be related. People do change tomb locations without alien intervention, you know Doctor?_ ”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll play chess with yours when your time comes, then.”

“ _We did our work. If there’s something else, well… Uncertain alien threat that needs quick and in-depth intervention, trying to contain everything on a small scale? That’s Torchwood, Doctor. Not us._ ”

“Well, I quite figured out that an office in Glasgow couldn’t quite be helpful unless I wanted to learn origami. I still don’t know if I already know how to do them, you know? It would have been a double loss of time.”

“ _I meant Three, Doctor, not Two._ ” The General argued annoyed. “ _Even though it pains me to say that, you should ask Harkness._ ”

“Jack keeps rebuilding and dismantling his Torchwood on a whim lately.”The Doctor replied, pouting at the casual reference to the top member of his own Guilt List.

If Rose, Martha and Donna were labelled as various shades of ‘ _guilt_ ’ in his mind, thinking about what he had done to Jack’s life put the happy-go-lucky conman more on a level of ‘ _kill me now_ ’.

“I need someone who can focus. I can’t do that myself, I need someone who’s better than me at that!”

“ _It has been three months since Torchwood finally began working regularly._ ”

“Well, he made it work for even longer before dismantling it again.”

“ _I won’t hope for it this time, Doctor._ ” The generally optimistic General said with a loud sigh. “ _Their damn archivist is back._ ”

“I’m sorry?” There were so many things that didn’t make sense in such a short statement that the Doctor couldn’t even begin putting them on a straight line in his mind.

“ _Oh, c’mon!_ ” The General spurred him on. “ _Pale skin, eyes like daggers, smart, Welsh… Harkness’ toy-boy! You must know that little paperwork devil._ ”

The General’s last comment made the Doctor’s brain gears stop their elaborating information work. If he had understood correctly who was the man the General was speaking about, well no. He had never known him. He had never cared enough to meet Jack’s friends, since he was already too busy trying to not lose his owns.

No matter how much he knew Jack loved his custom-made Torchwood and no matter how much he knew he would end up suffering alone after he lost them. Having lived a long life himself should have taught him better, especially considering how he himself had lost all the people he cared for anyway.

Why the heck had he even thought Jack would have been better on his own away from his eyes when he realized the mess Rose had done? It was a complete nonsense considering that the captain was born human. Still, he had to admit, it was a whole lifetime ago.

“Never knew him actually.” The Doctor barely whispered before focusing back on the task at hand. “But! More important than that: did you just say that Jack’s boyfriend, the one who died four years ago, is back? When did it happen?”

“ _Harkness barely told us about half an hour ago. Why do you think we’ve been so busy??_ ”

“Why would his coming back matter with you anyway?” He argued back.

“ _We nicked some stuff from Torchwood._ ” The General confessed frustrated. “ _Both One and Three. Jones will kill us in paperwork if we don’t give that back. The kid was Torchwood One and even when working with Three he still kept correspondence with Two. He knows all the Torchwood archives by heart despite being a bloody whore!_ ”

The Doctor scowled and shook his head in disappointment. Priorities, these damn apes always got their priorities wrong and that didn’t include just UNIT. Jack was an ape without the right priorities too. An immortal ape that he strongly suspected had been hopping around space making messes as he went by.

There was still hope that things weren’t related though, there was always hope after all. Still he wouldn’t put it past Jack to try something desperate out of love or grief, since Captain Ape didn’t acknowledge half-ways.

“Just tell me one more thing. Where was he buried? Jack’s boyfriend, I mean.”

“ _In Cardiff’s graveyard, obviously. Recently they made fictitious tombs next to his for the other Torchwood staff members whose bodies blew up along with their hub a few years ago._ ”

“Their names?”

There were few moments of silence filled with key tapping.

“ _Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper…_ ”

“Suzie Costello?”

“ _Yeah, her too._ ”

“Thanks for your help.” The Doctor concluded, giving up any hope for Jack’s innocence in this. “Now I’ve got a little bad immortal ape to spank.”

And with that, the Time Lord put the receiver back into its place and did what everyone else would do in such a situation: he asked for the directions to Torchwood and was kindly pointed towards the bay.

So much for the secret base of a secret organization.

 

In the meantime, Jack and Ianto had found out the Weevil’s hideout and had the situation contained. Despite the few concerns left about Ianto’s safety, they managed to get rid of the alien without much harm to themselves or to their victim.

“C’mon, boy, let’s head home.” Ianto told to the struggling Weevil, pushing him along.

“Boy? You sure it’s a boy?” Jack asked him, crestfallen.

“Why? You wanted a girl?”

“Lately I never managed to get a girl alive, would you believe that?” He explained with a sigh. “I still miss a replacement for Janet.”

Ianto looked carefully at his lover, trying to not laugh in his face. “Well, for the moment you should stick with Bred I guess. You know, I could continue Owen’s study on them if you want. I doubt you had someone to look after the researches in these years.”

Jack pushed his lover away playfully and helped him restrain the Weevil.

“Instead of thinking about finding yourself more work, why don’t you look at the fun of it? First pterodactyl date and we came back with a pterodactyl, first Weevil date and we came back with a Weevil.”

“Kids before marriage, shame on you captain Jack Harkness.” Ianto teased him, shaking his head gravely.

“A boy and a girl sounds ideal though, doesn’t it?” Jack said, laughing.

“Thought you didn’t do kids anymore?”

“Well…” Jack told him as he leaned over Ianto to steal a peck on his boyfriend lips in front of the hissing alien. “Who knows what the future will bring? And anyway I’m not against alien pets, they make life less boring.”

They secured the Weevil inside the SUV and then drove back to the hub. As soon as they entered with their prey though, they noticed a stranger in a bowtie glaring at them, sitting quietly on a chair in front of the water tower.

Still keeping a hand each on the Weevil, they both reached for their guns and pointed them at the intruder.

“Who the hell are you and how did you get inside!?” Jack asked sternly.

The newcomer simply stared back at him without even flinching.

“Bad bad ape.” He drawled, playing with his sonic screwdriver.

The tension left suddenly Jack’s shoulders as he lowered his gun.

“Doctor?”

At those words Ianto lowered his gun too, but only to stare suspiciously at Jack.

“How the hell are you dressed up, now?” Jack asked disappointed as he took in the bowtie and the heartbreaking absence of a suit.

“Uh? You like it?” The Doctor asked happily, sitting up a little bit more straight and forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be mad at Jack. “Bowties are cool aren’t they?”

Jack and Ianto gave him a second measuring glance and then they both grimaced at the tastelessness of the ensemble.

“Oh yeah, the only thing that could make it worse would be a fez.” Ianto deadpanned, gaining a pout and an offended stare from the Doctor.

“I don’t like you. And how are old are you anyway? Dressed up like a crossed _mid-aged_ know-it-all mature…” He gesticulated confusedly as he thought about a proper retort. “ _old man_.”

Ianto simply stared at him, completely uncaring. “I’m twenty-six, so it’s expected from me to dress decently. At least I’m not a over nine hundred years old crossed half-mad _old alien_ who likes to dress like a _five years old_ without fashion taste, just because he can’t bear-”

“Ianto?” Jack interrupted him, tentatively tapping his boyfriend’s shoulder. “I-I don’t think we should cross the Doctor, no matter how much I like hearing your velvety voice.”

The Doctor, who was still pouting offended at Ianto, suddenly was all smiling widely at Jack.

“I like you!”

“That’s a new one.” Jack said, crooking his eyebrow in disbelief.

The Doctor thought about the reason why Jack wouldn’t be keen believing him, until it finally clicked.

“Oh, yeah. Back then. Well new me new likes, I guess. This new me likes you! Strange, because I actually shouldn’t. However, despite what you’ve done- might have done, I keep liking you anyway. You wear braces!”  

“I’ll be back in a minute.” Ianto muttered, glaring suspiciously at the Doctor and fearing a new rebounding of the two friends over the braces while he took Bred to the vaults. He wouldn’t put a bet on it, but he was relatively sure that the Weevil was all too pleased himself to leave the duo.

Back to Jack, he somehow guessed that Ianto’s actions were actually a code for ‘ _Get rid of him_ ’.

“So” The Doctor began conversationally, as soon as they were alone. “Who did you sell your soul to in order to have the grumpy thing back?”

“He’s not grumpy, he just loves me much more than I deserve. Besides, his coming back to life seemed to be a gift.” Jack retorted outraged, crossing his hands over his chest. “Some friends _do_ bend the rules of time and space despite the implications.”

The Doctor had left him behind, insulted him, barely thanked him when he proved to be actually useful, left him alone to lose his whole life thanks to the 456, offered him a night of meaningless sex with a space sailor thinking he could be back to his old carefree self just like that, and now he also dared to accuse him of something he had no hand in when he finally had the love of his life back.

There was actually no surprise that Ianto was furious, if he didn’t still consider the Doctor his friend, he would be too.

“A gift?” The Doctor asked, sincerely curious. “From who?”

“No clue.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Another Ianto came here from the future three months ago, didn’t you pick that up? You’re supposed to know everything.” Jack teased.

“What did he said _precisely_?” The Doctor asked while ignoring him, his voice almost clinical under the light coating of deadly curiosity.

Unfortunately Jack was beginning to get sick of his friend’s continuous asking without any sign of actual concern or affection. It had been years since they last saw each other and there hadn’t been a single thing the Doctor had done or said to show he had missed him.  

“I have no idea, he erased my memory!” Jack cried out, his mouth twisting in hurt. “Ask Gwen when she’s in tomorrow if that’s so important for you! Geez, I’m here at a loss dealing with this damn immortality thing and now that something good actually happens, you’re ready to take it away from me! I thought we were friends!”

The two men stared at one another for a long time, studying each other carefully. The moment Ianto got back from the vaults and saw them like this, he quickly run at Jack’s side, trying to offer him moral support in front of analytic stare of the Time Lord, who looked at Ianto and then back to Jack a couple of more times as his angry frown slowly left space to a surprised one.

“You don’t know.” He said as he took a couple more steps towards them.

“What?” The two lovers said together.

“You both don’t know.” He pointed out cryptically, his gaze still switching from Jack to Ianto.

“What d’you mean?” Jack tried again, this time grasping tightly Ianto’s shoulder to draw him closer.

The Doctor turned his back to them and went to get his device. He threw it a couple of times in the air, flashed it here and there with his sonic screwdriver and pick poked it a bit.

“I’m sorry Jack, I thought you were hopping around making new immortals on a whim, but I guess I was totally wrong. So sad being wrong, so very sad. I never like it when it happens.”

Much to the Doctor’s dismay, Jack and Ianto lost the best part of his childish gibberish as their heart plainly stopped in their chests as soon as they heard the words ‘ _new immortals_ ’.

“Doctor, what do you mean?” Jack asked again, the very picture of panic, but the Doctor simply kept tinkering.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN I SAID!” He screamed, this time taking the Time Lord’s shoulders and making him focus on him by force.

“He cannot be like me!” Jack’s plead earned him a sad pout from his friend, who finally realised that he could not keep the matter suspended until the device had finished its work and could give him more detailed answers. He had failed the captain too many times only because he had overestimated the man‘s ability to adapt, Jack really didn’t deserve such a treatment anymore.

He freed himself from Jack’s grip and scanned Ianto with his screwdriver as professionally as he could get.

“He’s not as a fixed point in time as you are, Jack, but he still is something like… half of it? Maybe a little more than a half… 75% maybe. A little less depending on how much time flux we’re considering.”

“What’s the difference?” Jack asked, completely confused.

“You will lose him again, Jackey-boy. I’m sorry.” Both Jack and Ianto had to swallow at that.

“But it won’t be as soon as you thought.” He continued happily, hoping to cheer them up. “You have more than half a forever to stay together. This is good, Jackey! Aren’t you happy, Grumpy Pants?”

“But- How can it be possible?” Ianto asked puzzled, trying to rationalize things in order to escape the shock of the revelation. “What if someone kills me? Will I come back like Jack?”

The Doctor stared at him, his jaw dropping in surprise.

“Smart boy you’ve here, Jackey. Good choice, I like him. Now. As in _for the moment_. You know, I have no idea.”

He lowered his eyes and tapped absentmindedly his temple with a finger, still deep in thoughts.

“You must be if you’re substantially fixed, there’s no other chance… But why!? Jack can because of the-… Oh.”

Two pair of blue eyes stared open wide at him, trying to follow his convulse trail of thoughts and failing at it.

“Ianto, isn’t it?” The Doctor said to get his attention. “Weird name by the way.”  

Ianto simply grimaced as he faked a too wide smile. “Says the man called after a job.”

The Doctor ignored his protests, taking them as the yes he wanted it to be.

“What do you remember of the moment you came back to life, what did you feel?”

“Pain… Like walking on broken glass. Twice. In the middle there was just darkness and… Sort of worms crawling around me.”

“Worms aside is more or less what I do feel myself.” Jack considered wearily.

Ianto looked at his boyfriend and patted his arm reassuringly. Jack smiled back at him and took his hand, drawing him closer as he tenderly nudged his head.

“I have a theory truth to be told. That would explain differences and similarities.” The Doctor explained, failing miserably at keeping the seriously concerned face he was supposed to because of all the excitement. “I think you died twice.”

“What!?” They asked in chorus.

“My theory,” The Doctor continued, walking around them and gesturing in their direction. “Is that as soon as the energy got you, you came back to life. But no one knew the precise hour, so I guess that it took you some time to reach the graveyard?”

He stopped abruptly, fixing his eyes expectantly on Jack.

“About half an hour,” The captain confirmed, not understanding why this particular was so important. “Future Ianto said he was going to come back, but he never said how, so we thought it safer to stay at the base with all the devices set on tracking down something unusual.”

“UNIT have a closer base in the area thought.” The Doctor continued, like he had barely heard Jack. “Let’s say… fifteen minutes tops? But when they got there everything was dead. Again.”

The couple shrugged, still staring wide-eyed at the Doctor, who sometimes kept snatching glances at them to check if they were understanding where all this was going.

“I think,” The Time Lord kept on, this time staring directly into Ianto’s eyes. “That the shock of coming back, the pain from your half decomposed body and the limited stale air around you did you in before UNIT came. Then they got away, Jack came and you revived again. Probably in the minutes in between your body must have healed, because you look pretty good to me for a four year decomposing corpse, especially if you take into consideration how the hair and nails keep growing for a while after death but you don’t look like cousin It.”

Ianto swallowed and felt all his strength vanish as his head lightened, but Jack was quick and got him before he fell, fainted, on the floor. He picked him up in his arms and then gently took him to the sofa.

“Ianto? Ianto, how are you? Do you want a glass of water?” Jack cooed worriedly, giving him light slaps on his cheek to wake him up. Ianto eventually nodded, still confused, and the captain vanished in the kitchen corner to get him a drink.

While messing around in the kitchenette to find a glass, he nevertheless kept his glare fixed on the Doctor.

“Your bedside manners are way more rubbish than mine!”

The Doctor stared completely surprised at Jack’s anger and Ianto’s distress.

“I thought you were ‘ _mighty Torchwood_ ’,” He argued, sincerely worried even though some displeasure slightly marked his voice for not getting any kind of praise for his extremely cool diagnosis. “And he experienced you! He’s supposed to be used to things like these.”

“Does he look _used to things like these_ to you!?” Jack cried from upstairs, finally finding a glass. “Think about how to reverse this mess instead!”

As soon as he accepted that matters were a little bit more complicate than he thought for the Welshman, the Doctor gravitated in front of him with no idea on how to solve the situation. Somehow the displeased pout on his lips didn’t make Ianto feel any better.

“I’m sorry, I can’t reverse it.”

Ianto nodded half-heartedly, but the Doctor smiled at him cheerfully, patting him on the shoulder in a forced friendly way.

“C’mon! You won’t be alone and you won’t leave Jacketty-Jack alone for a long time. Aren’t you happy?”

Instead of making Ianto happy though, the Doctor’s words simply threw new blades in his heart.

“What if he wants to?” Ianto asked the Doctor worriedly, making him stare back at him with both his eyebrows rose up in confusion.

“I would never.” Jack cut in before the Time Lord could speak, offering Ianto the glass of cold water he had gone fetching. “I love you, Ianto, and even though I would never wish this immortal life upon my worst enemy, now that you have it… if you chose to spend it with me, I won’t even be scared about the implications, because now I know what life is without you and I don’t want it again. It’s all up to you.”

Ianto threw his arms around Jack’s waist, almost knocking out the glass of water in the process.

“I love you too. And I _am_ scared, but I’m also glad you’re not alone anymore, even if it means I’m condemned forever.” Ianto tried to smile at him. “At least now you can’t say I won’t understand.”

“I’m not happy with this either, you know?” Jack said holding him tight. “What will happen when you’ll see Gwen dying? When you will see Rhiannon, Mica, David, Anwen and all the other people we know and will know? Your heart will break.”

“Then we run away together?”

Ianto looked up at him with hopeful yet scared eyes, his lips a tight line. Jack knew that nothing was going to help, so he stick with the physical demonstrations of love that always served them right, and held him to his heart.

He knew that he was being egoistical to feel so good deep inside himself when his lover’s life had been tore apart like that, but if he could protect this thing they had for this half of forever they had together, maybe this double curse could really turn out a nice gift like Future Ianto had predicted. 

**T.B.C.**


	5. Lessons on immortality

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood and Doctor Who, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue bring Ianto back to Jack first.

 **Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY. Constructive criticism always appreciated. Eleventh convoluted speech and Graphic sex at the end.

After long minutes of drowning into each other’s eyes, Jack and Ianto were harshly brought back to reality by the Doctor’s device beeping loudly.

The Time Lord himself was startled from his slouched position in the seat, where he was trying to ignore the two lovebirds lost in Romance Drama World. He leaped towards the desk where he had left his box, and began to thoroughly check each side of it.

“Oh,” was the Doctor’s only comment as soon as he got the right display.

The couple sensed bad news coming, and held each other close.

“What’s up?” Jack asked him, trying to go for nonchalant worry.

“I managed to find the source of the energy that brought him back,” The Doctor explained happily, punching the strange device a couple of more times to reassure himself that the data was actually right.

“It’s the second time you said that _some kind of energy_ resuscitated me,” Ianto cut in pensively. “But if we can find what this force is, can’t we find a cure? Maybe one that would work for Jack too.”

“What brought me back to life was time vortex,” Jack explained, frowning sadly. “There’s no _cure_ for that.”

“So…” Ianto stared at him, crestfallen. “If I found one for myself, I would consciously fail you…”

Jack gave him a sad smile as an answer.

“I want you happy and I know that immortality like mine would put you through a lot of pain. You wouldn’t fail me, Ianto. I can’t hold against you the desire to have a normal life.”

“There’s no actual point in talking about that, because you can’t be cured too!” The Doctor interrupted them annoyed, as he separated them with his hand to have the attention back to _him_. “Blimey, you really like to forget me! I’m heeeere!”

“How’s that?” Ianto asked challengingly as his eyes met the Doctor’s empty stare. “Why can’t there be a cure? Whether we want to use it or not, why _can’t_ there be one?”

The Doctor took a chair and sat right in front of them. Even though at a first glance it looked like he wanted to make them part of a secret, somehow Ianto and Jack suspected that he simply hoped to convey more attention on him this way.

“First of all, I need to know _exactly_ what that Ianto from the future told you. I want a second batch of proof just to be sure.” He focused his attention on Ianto and gave him a forced friendly punch on his shoulder. “You’re too smart not to leave hints, aren’t you?”

“Thank you for the praise, but since it’s my future and Jack has been retconned, we would need to call in Gwen and hope she remembers.” Ianto retorted, eying the Doctor suspiciously as he massaged his pained shoulder.

“I lied before.” Jack interrupted them, leaping enthusiastically to one of the computer stations and switching it on. “You know, Doctor, my baby is truly smart, you’re right. In fact he managed to delete or disable the cameras for all the CCTV in the hub and wherever we went, eeeexcept… this one!”

Jack clicked a single key and the graveyard car park appeared on the screen.

“Do I need to know why you have this file among the rapid access ones?” Ianto asked suspiciously, but his lover simply looked at him with a cheerless smile on his lips.

“I missed you. This was the only thing that kept proving to me that you would be back. I’m an old man, Ianto, I can’t live off feelings of hope. Seeing your smile was a way more useful reminder.”

“You two certainly flirt a lot,” The Doctor intruded again, his eyes fixed on the screen waiting for Future Ianto to appear on it.

“And actually you’re not telling me to stop.” Jack noticed for the first time surprised. “What happened? This regeneration has fewer morals?”

“I knew you had him home.” The Doctor admitted tersely, knitting his eyebrows together as he saw Jack, Gwen and Rhys finally enter the scene on the computer screen. “And well, this regeneration seems to have _more_ morals sincerely, but I _do_ still wonder what to do with them sometimes.”

Jack lowered his eyes guiltily, but Ianto reassured him patting him on the shoulder. Finally Future Ianto made his appearance on the monitor too and everyone’s attention switched back to the footage.

_‘In three months, you will receive… well, a gift from an old friend… I cannot say more, I’m sorry.’_

“You see? From an old friend…It could be anyone,” Jack concluded, pleased with himself as he pointed at the video now in pause.

“Percentages say you usually mean Rose Tyler, Jack.” Ianto corrected him, placing his hands on his hips.

“How would you know?” Jack turned to look at him and Ianto smiled knowingly at him, straightening his shoulders.

“60% Rose Tyler, 20% past lovers, 10% the Doctor, but figures are steadily going down for him since you most frequently say ‘ _the right kind of doctor_ ’, 10% others.”

The Doctor stared at him amazed, fighting with himself to not laugh. “He _figure_ d you out, uh? Could I borrow him sometimes?”

Jack glared at his _‘old friend’_ and held Ianto possessively. “Only if you give him back in reasonable time and only if he wants to. One does _not_ exclude the other.”

The Doctor pouted like a kid who had just been denied chocolate.

“Anyway, back to angst matters,” He continued happily. “Toy boy’s guess was my own.”

“How have we gone from tea-boy to toy-boy?” Ianto argued offended, but his boyfriend gestured him to let it be as turned to the Doctor.

“So?” Jack asked instead.

“I couldn’t define the energy type or its origins,” The Doctor explained. “But this beautiful device can also be set on manual, so if I give it some space and temporal coordinates, let’s say satellite5 around year 200.105, it can analyze whatever kind of energy had its source in that place and year and tell me if that is the same one we’re searching for!”

“Wait, what!?” The captain demanded, recognizing the coordinates.

“And it’s time vortex!” The Doctor concluded enthusiastically. “I told you Rose _Guilt_ Tyler became a vengeful human Time Goddess, remember? She could see past, present _and_ future, so I bet that when she brought you alive forever, she saw what it would have done to you.”

“But Rose didn’t remember turning me immortal,” Jack reasoned unsure, fearing the end of the Doctor’s explanation.

“After I took away from her the heart of the TARDIS, she lost the infinite knowledge she had.” The Doctor said matter-of-factly. “I actually didn’t think she had enough time to try righting her wrongs, but I guess this was really human of her too. Maybe. I mean, humans are supposed to be human or they wouldn’t be human, would they?”

“Right her wrongs?” Jack asked slowly, beginning to pierce the fragments together and not liking the outcome one single bit.

“A gift, cap! Think about it!” The Doctor continued, jumping in between Jack and Ianto to pat friendly the captain’s shoulder. “She sees your pain over losing your lover, so she brings him back to you! The T.A.R.D.I.S. has never been much of an o‘clock on her own though, so I can guess that’s the reason for the four years delay. Well, that along piercing together fragments of soul after the Big Bang Boom, but I see the Time Vortex on holiday a more reasonable reason for it.”

Jack fell on the nearest chair, his eyes lost far away as he tried to steady his breathing.

“So, I brought this on him!” The Doctor simply stared at the shocked Jack, not understanding what was wrong with him. “Why is it always my fault, Doctor?”

“It’s not your fault being left grieving and heartbroken.” He answered lightly, trying to be helpful despite the deep confused frown that marred his features.

Even though his face was still a mask of complete lack of understanding rather than a warm one, he still looked completely sincere and concerned, this time.

“If nothing else, this is _my_ fault.” Ianto supplied with a smile, even thought his voice was cheerless.

Jack took his hand and managed to get him sitting on his legs to hold him properly.

“I’m sorry Ianto. You will suffer my same curse only because I was too egoist to let you go.”

Ianto cradled his lover’s head on his chest and began stroking his hair softly.

“It’s ok. I never wanted to leave you alone.”

“But now you have no other choice…”

“I reckon we’ve been too quick considering the situation at hand,” Ianto told him after a while. “Think about it: we have more choices now than we had before.”

Jack frowned, but didn’t dare look up at him. Whatever cleverness those Welsh vowels would speak, he knew that his lover’s heartbeat was way more trustful than Ianto’s words, and right now it felt crazily panicked.

“Why do you say this?”

“Now our _relationship_ won’t have to survive only the test of my life, Jack. You can’t get bored with me and stay, waiting for my death before finally go and find someone new. You will _have to_ be honest, because if you really want us to be seriously involved, we’re going to have it like everyone else... Only for the longest time.” Ianto waited a few seconds before pronouncing the dreaded words. “You can still back off.”

“I’m not changing idea about us! Mortal or not, I _want_ to be an actual boyfriend to you. Maybe who knows, being immortal might make you willing to broaden our horizons a little?” Jack looked up smirking and met Ianto’s scowl. “Still, I would never make you do something you don’t want us to do.”

“Aren’t we a bit early to speak about cheating?”

“I never cheated on you Ianto Jones and I’m not planning to do it now. I meant more along the lines of games that require more players. I offered to spice up _our_ relationship, not vary my diet. You will never get boring, it’s more than sex between us. It has been for very a long time.”

“Just promise me that you won’t lie to me if something happens or changes, Jack. That will be fine.”

“What if _you_ get bored with me Ianto? You always feared you wouldn’t live over thirty, no matter what you said about dying of old age back in London. I know you.”

“I love you, Jack. This for me means until death do us part. Being immortal might change that, I can’t know for sure. But right now, this is who I am. Let’s live in the present… Love in the present. Like we always did.”

Warm tears fell, marring his cheeks and wetting the soft material of his trousers. Jack cupped his boyfriend’s cheek with his hand, hoping to stop them, but they still came out freely.

“Because if we don’t, I don’t know how to live by this, Jack. I’m scared.”

Jack held Ianto even tighter, hoping that the contact could help soothe both of their worries.

“I’ve been scared my whole life, I won’t let it happen to you too. Talk to me, Ianto, stay with me, love me… And I’ll do the same for you. Now, let me be selfish for a while and be happy for the gift she gave me, because regardless of everything else, you by my side forever is everything I ever wanted.”

“Three-quarters of forever.” Ianto argued, smiling at him.

“Good enough.” Jack told him, before turning to stare at the Doctor. “I’ve got another question, Doc. _This_ is why the rift is back again, isn’t it?”

“Sorry?” The Time Lord asked puzzled, staring at Jack as he jumped away from the rift monitoring device he was poking curiously. Ianto looked at his lover like he was speaking nonsense too.

“Doctor, six months after Thames House-” The captain stopped, glancing nervously at his lover before focusing back on the Doctor. “ _Something_ happened and that _something_ closed the rift. _Things_ were getting dangerous.”

Jack hoped with all his might that the Time Lord could understand what he was referring to without giving out too much to Ianto, who seemed to have forgotten those tragic moments. Somehow the message got to the Doctor and, before speaking, he glanced nervously at the Welshman too.

“Oh, _that_. Think so. Even though it began about five months ago according to the T.A.R.D.I.S., I told you she isn’t much of an o’clock, her energy might have caused interferences as she glued up his-”

“Doctor!” Jack interrupted, glaring at him and nodding in his boyfriend’s direction.

The Doctor put quickly his hands over his mouth and looked guiltily back at Jack. He turned apologetically at Ianto as he lowered them, in front of the Welshman disbelieving stare.

“Jack, what happened six months after my death? You keep mentioning it, but you never explain.”

Jack brought him closer to him, trying to forget the moment he told that Ianto that he had been dead for months, the look in his eyes, the cold words that followed and even worse how his lover had sacrificed his life once again to protect the Earth. The way Ianto couldn’t accept he had brought him back among the livings, being it his fault or not.

“Nothing happened, Ianto. I just wanted to see you again and got myself involved in a little mess.”

“This _does_ have something to do with me then.”

Ianto could feel that he was right even without Jack’s answer as he felt him tense around him.

“Oh no, silly!” The Doctor cut in, trying to mend the damages with a big smile and total denial. “Jacketty-Jack here is only worried to get you upset about something already archived! He stumbled on it and it was pretty bad, but it has _nothing_ to do with you!”

Ianto didn’t believe him for a second, but some of those words made Jack jump slightly in surprise.

“Is it archived? Really?” He asked unsurely, earning a heartfelt smile from the Doctor for the first time.

“Yeah, Jack. Somehow your plan worked better than you though, so the only side effect you should expect is the rift activity spiking again. The seal was already breaking and I think Future Ianto coming here speeded up the process even before the actual deal.”

Jack tightened his arms around Ianto even more, as he stretched up to place a loving kiss on the side of his head.

“I love you, Ianto.” He said tenderly in his ear.

It was then that memories flashed in front of Ianto’s eyes as they were a bad dream he once had: the bar, his father, the bomb. Them telling each other how they loved one another and him blowing up the rift to seal Cardiff from further damages.

He had understood as soon as he saw Jack so skittish, caring and almost scared around him that his death had a great deal to do with the captain’s slightly worn out condition, but what he had never thought was that he was actually _responsible_ for it, aside for doing his work. No matter how it had happened, he was alive at the pub and he had consciously given it up, breaking Jack beyond reparation. He had the chance to mend what his and his grandson’s death had done to the love of his life and he had consciously blown it up. Along with himself and the rift.

He and Jack knew that if the same situation were to happen a second time he would do it again, and no matter how much immortal he was at the moment, the rift could easily kill him all the same. He still didn’t deem his life as important as the survival of the Earth and Cardiff… but there was also Jack.

He should have never let his captain fall in love with him in the first place, no matter how much he had dreamed of it, no matter how deeply he cared for the man. Still the damage was done and he had to live by it, just like Gwen had said. Forever, in his case.

“Ianto?”

Ianto realized that he had frozen in Jack’s arms and that now his boyfriend was staring at him, his face the very picture of absolute panic. That brought up another problem: Jack didn’t want him to remember.

There was only one thing he could do.

“I’m fine Jack.” He told him, his voice soft and warm as he cupped Jack’s cheek with his hand. “I’m sorry, I thought I was remembering something, but I was wrong. I love you too.”

Jack relaxed and took Ianto’s hand in his, kissing tenderly his palm, before staring back at him.

“I’ll never let you go again, I swear this to you. I’ll find a way to keep you with me even when your time will come, no matter how much is the price.”

“What if you get tired to be with me by then?” Ianto teased with a smile on his lips, gazing in Jack’s storm blue eyes.

“Never” Jack surely stated and leaned over Ianto to meet his lover’s lips again in a sweet kiss.

“ _Soooorry_ to cut in, but I _really_ should _really_ go, now. I swear I’ll be passing by more often to keep an eye on you two, you just…” The Doctor stopped, searching for the right word as he gestured confusedly up and down with his finger. “Don’t hop around too much if you get the chance. Deal?”

Ianto stood up and Jack followed, both of them pretending to hide the smirk that crept on their lips at the Doctor’s bad choice of words, and they wished him good journey.

“Doctor?” Jack called, stopping him half-way through the hub. “If you don’t mind me asking, what made you wait all this time before seeing any of us? Martha, Mickey, Sarah-Jane and I were all quite worried.”

The Doctor waggled childishly on his feet, searching for words.

“Because I ruined you guys, Jackey-boy. I can’t look at you in the eyes without feeling guilty. I tried to do something for you at the very end… But it wasn’t enough and I couldn’t change you back. You guys became war machines, soldiers alone in the cold. Scared, broken, infected. A while ago I had to search the universe for people that could help me, but when I thought about you guys… I had to wonder what _I_ could offer _you_ to pay my debt. Nothing is enough, Jack, it’s better pretend I never hurt you.”

Jack bit his lower lip as he approached the Doctor, looking uncertain at him. “Would you hug us?”

The Doctor looked at him surprised and nodded insecurely, as he watched Jack closing the space between them until they were only few inches apart.

“Then do it.” He instructed.

The Time Lord tentatively hugged his friend, who held him as soon as he was sure the Doctor wouldn’t bolt away in shock. When they separated, Jack stared at him, a confident smile shining on his face.

“Now we’re square, Doctor. Whenever you need help, you know where to find us. I’m pretty sure this will work with everyone else in the ex-companions club too. No need to feel guilty anymore.”

He stared at his friend with wide eyes, his lips tightening in a sort of awkward smile. “Thank you.”

Jack looked back at Ianto and offered him his hand. Ianto, understanding the hint, walked at his side and let his lover’s arm encircle his shoulders.

“See you then, Doctor.” He said, leaning on his boyfriend for comfort.

“Both of you!” The Doctor said, trying to fight the embarrassment of the unconventional and emotionally over-dramatic situation he was in. “Behave and take care, ok? Old Rose might have made a mess bringing Jack back forever, but being a Time Lord Goddess the wrong part was just the forever. And the same goes for Ianto. It was no chance she got precisely him out of all your lovers.”

“I know that too,” Jack said smiling warmly at his blushing lover. “I’m lucky to have him.”

“Oh and, toy-boy? Cheer up will you? We just met, but you seem to come in the package along with Jack, so I think that I’ll keep liking you all things considered. At least until you will decide to be a boring grumpy adult again.”

Ianto stifled a laugh. “Thank you, I guess. Any suggestions about this immortality by the way?”

“Weell,” The Doctor said thoughtful. “That’s really Jackey’s thing isn’t it? Let him give you lessons, and… Well, you know this better than me! You’re the lovey-cozey ones, I’ll call myself out of it. You will find your own way to…learn the materials.”

He shooed them away from him and trotted happily out of the cog door, followed by Jack’s loud laugh.

“Are we going to follow his advice?” Jack asked his boyfriend lewdly as soon as they were alone, a wide smirk gracing his lips.

“I think so.” Ianto answered utterly serious. “I’ll go grab some paper and a pen.”

 

After an hour or so, Jack found himself incredibly disturbed by the enormous quantity of technicalities Ianto’s mind could come up with. He had been immortal for more than one or two thousand years, but he had never encountered any situation that needed a so detailed planning like his boyfriend seemed to think.

“Look, you shouldn’t bother about how many people could notice that we don’t age just walking around the streets,” He repeated for what felt like the third time. “Most people simply don’t care! And we have retcon for the few that do mind.”

“Yeah, but do you realise that using retcon like that could be considered _for personal use_? We’re not allowed that.” Ianto pointed out tapping his notes with the back of his pen.

“Ianto, c’mon, none of us ever cared! And it wouldn’t be _for personal use_ , because it would fall into _protection of our secrecy_. That’s allowed, I checked.”

“I never stole a thing for my personal use.” Ianto argued back, mildly offended as he crossed his arms on his chest. “And when it happens for you it’s different… You are the boss, you _are_ the organization itself! I would be just a nuisance to get rid of since I’m only the toy-boy tea-boy.”

Jack growled at him, stopping himself before he told Ianto that as a matter of fact _he_ was the organization itself, since his death had brought the first wrecking of what was known as Torchwood Three. Gwen alone had never managed to keep everything together and Jack hadn’t been of much help.

“Damn Owen and the Doctor for these tea boy and toy boy complexes. Those are _not_ the qualification I hired you for! Do you really think the Crown will pay you that much for being a butler? And no, Ianto,” He kept going, despite Ianto’s attempt to say something. “We will _not_ get over _again_ on how we’re paid a lot because this is a dangerous work, but we can’t actually stay dead. The pain and the trouble we have to get through are enough to make the pay well earned. Buy your sister a cruise around the world, if you feel guilty about the money.”

Ianto shut his mouth and frowned, pouting at Jack, but this time his light blue eyes could do nothing to mellow the captain.

“Besides it has been _an hour_ since we began doing _this_ and I still can’t believe you’re serious.” Jack stated, pointing to the five pages long list Ianto was writing under the name of ‘ _Immortality-lesson 1_ ’.

“There are two of us, it can expose Torchwood and our lives too much. We need to be prepared! And we still didn’t talk about the flat.”

Ianto’s argument made Jack raise a questioning eyebrow at him.

“What’s to talk about it? Weren’t we going to see the estate agent tomorrow?”

“What about seventy years from now? What will the neighbours say? Won’t it raise suspicions if the owner never changes? Maybe I should just arrange a bunker of my own…”

Jack sighed, took a chair from one of the stations and sat down next to Ianto, letting a comforting hand rest on his lover’s leg.

“You should have your flat, Ianto. We’ll make it through the details, don’t worry. If suspicions arise we’ll buy you another one, or you can stay here until they forget and then we’ll go back as descendents of the previous owner.”

“You keep saying we.” Ianto stated uncertainly and Jack only then noticed how fragile and unsure his lover appeared to be. There were too many things that were different all of sudden in his boyfriend‘s life and for someone as organized as Ianto was, it certainly had to be a complete subversion of his world.

He felt the same at the beginning, so he could understand how Ianto’s need to hold tight on the few things that were stable in his life could clash against the will to adapt to the new reality, before he liked too much something he wouldn’t be allowed to keep. Jack had done the second thing too many times to not realise how wrong it was, and he had no intention to let Ianto make his same mistake.

“Shouldn’t I? I enjoyed coming over to spend time with you. My bunker is convenient, but certainly not cosy.”

“Well, yes. It’s reasonable.”

Somehow Jack noticed that he had made it worse and not surprisingly he had no clue how he had done it.

“Ianto?”

“Look, never mind. I simply read too much into your words.”

After a while filled with silence and nervous tipping of pen over paper, the message finally got to Jack exactly when Ianto decided to avoid the embarrassing situation with his usual excuse of making more coffee.

“Ianto, wait!” He managed to reach for his lover’s arm and stop him. “I need to stay at the hub, you know that. Gwen can’t because of her family and I’m the only actual field agent left. We can’t lose you as researcher, you were right… Gwen and I are not research material and Torchwood fell behind despite the lack of rift activity in years. You have too much to catch up with to do night watches.”

“I was not asking for you to move in with me, Jack.” Ianto explained calmly. “We’ve been back together for less than 24 hours and I’ve always been scared by big official things that broadcast my private life, you know me. It’s just… I wouldn’t mind if you considered my flat a little bit yours. To be more than just a guest passing by.”

Jack smiled at him, realizing how he could actually understand and appreciate Ianto’s idea. After all they could set the alarms to his wrist-strap some of the quieter nights or leave Gwen at the hub with Rhys… Maybe looking better into her ideas for rotas and shifts wouldn’t hurt that much. 

“We can work on it.”

“Can we?” Ianto asked, staring at him hopefully.

“Well, I thought we agreed on living day by day” Jack explained, smiling a bit when his boyfriend nodded. “And I did say I love to spend time at your flat… I think we just have to make the most of it, like we’ve always done.”

Ianto smiled widely at him, recognizing the same words he had told his lover long time before, and nodded as he leaned more into Jack’s personal space.

“What about now?”

“Thought you’d never ask.” Jack said, a hint of desperation in his voice.

He crushed his lips on his lover’s ones, caressing absentmindedly his jaw and neck as he tried to get him closer. The kiss deepened as soon as their lips met, giving birth to a messy and needful clashing of tongues.

Somehow Ianto managed to pull his lover in his lap, making him straddle his tights. Jack quickly set aside the clipboard he was still holding and closed the space between them as much as he could while keeping the kiss going, rubbing himself against Ianto’s stomach.

“Want you…” Jack moaned, his words muffled by the kiss.

His movements were creating delicious friction on his lover’s groin too, so much that Ianto had to let go of Jack’s lips to catch his breath properly, his heart pumping madly in his chest.

“Want you too…” He told Jack as he captured his lips back into a short and languid kiss. “So much…”

Ianto tried to increase the friction, and Jack shifted enough so that his lover could start grinding on his arse.

“Ianto…” He moaned.

The Welshman conceded himself a small smirk seeing his lover already in the mood, and let his mouth trail down Jack’s chin and neck with open mouth kisses and possessive bites, as he held firmly his lover’s hips to keep the friction going.

Jack on the other hand put one of his arms around his boyfriend neck to not fall backwards, and with the other began a quick and messy work of Ianto’s shirt and waistcoat buttons. He was suddenly grateful that the well tailored black jacket which completed Ianto’s suit had already been discarded at the beginning of their _immortality lecture_.

Soon they were both breathing hard and their chests were exposed to each other’s hungry stares and touches.

“Shouldn’t we move this to bed?” Ianto asked as he felt Jack’s deft fingers fumbling with his zip.

“You’ve got better ideas?” Jack asked breathless, looking at his lover with need. When Ianto shook urgently his head, he grinned at him and rose back to his feet, making quick work of their trousers and undergarments. Instead of sitting back on Ianto though, he knelt in front of him, eagerly taking his boyfriend’s cock in his mouth.

Jack decided to work on his lover thoroughly, savouring Ianto’s peculiar taste and the strong smell of arousal. He did not know what 21st century guys felt once they got a chance to sense his pheromones, but he guessed that they must produce more or less the same effect that Ianto’s unique smell did to him, making him feel feisty and uncontrolled.

He felt himself smirk as he noticed how his boyfriend’s reaction were in no way different from the ones he was used to and he almost dared to fall back again into his memories. Almost, because now Ianto _was_ there and this was not a dream. Almost, because this time it was _his_ lover and he wasn’t borrowing him from some older version of himself. Almost, because now he knew that it would be _forever_.

He would get to keep the man he was making love to. Somehow, the same girl who had both saved and condemned him had brought him back to life again, returning Ianto, and now he had almost his whole lifetime to feel complete and alive. Now he had someone that could walk at his side for his whole lifetime.

A moan louder than the previous one made Jack focus on what he was doing and he felt extremely proud of himself. He nipped the inside of Ianto’s tight again and then he proceeded to leave a long trail of bites, moving towards his scrotum, taking care of ignoring exactly the point that had provoked his lover’s reaction.

“Damn Jack!” Ianto protested. “You’re a teas-!”

The Welshman choked on his words as Jack attacked once again the tiny bit of skin with extremely delicate bites and full tongue licks. He took his balls in his hand, licking them thoroughly before going back to the extremely engorged cock.   

Jack felt his lover tremble under his ministration and decided that teasing time was definitely over. He searched in the pockets of his discarded pants for the bottle of lube and took a firm grip of Ianto’s hips to shift them forward enough to prepare him.

As soon as he felt his boyfriend’s fingers in him, Ianto let his head fell backwards, but he discovered that he had to keep focused enough to not let himself buck too much into his lover’s mouth and not fall off the chair. Unfortunately, the more time passed, the more it was difficult for him to resist. In the end he had to give up and gripped tightly the chair’s sides to try and rely on physical strength.

“Jack” Ianto moaned. “It’s uncomfortable… Can’t keep going on like this.”

“You will do just fine,” Jack said, taking a moment to kiss his desperate lover, his fingers still working inside Ianto as his groin rubbed against Ianto’s to keep him distracted. “Gods, Ianto. You’re ready so quickly… I keep forgetting that for your body these four years never existed. You’re still young, hot and ready for me like no time passed.”

Jack’s kisses trailed down his neck as he lifted his lover’s legs enough to let his cock press against Ianto’s entrance, inevitably subverting the small balance the Welshmen had managed to get. Now almost all his weight was on his arms aside from the small support given by Jack’s hands on his hips.

“Jack, if I shift more I’ll fall… I can’t move my arms!” Ianto tried to warn him.

“That’s the point of it.” The captain answered cheekily, taking his time to enter his lover’s properly, without moving him too much out of the chair. Ianto moaned at the sensation and for some time he even forgot the discomfort of the precarious position he was in.

Jack thrust inside him one, two, three times with slow and deliberate movements to increase the teasing that was already maddening Ianto and then he suddenly increased his pace. The change in rhythm felt way more pleasurable for Ianto, but it also increased his physical distress by the second.

In few minutes he thought he had already reached his limit. Jack was good. Even though no one was touching his cock, he loved every second of it and the increased pace was just what he needed. On the other hand though, the distress and the frustration were killing him: his shoulders, his arms and his abs hurt and he couldn’t touch any part of Jack or himself the way he wanted.

The anguish somehow was making him even harder as well as it was putting him off.

“Jack…” He moaned. “Don’t keep me out… Please…”

Jack lowered towards him, capturing his lips in a searing kiss. The suddenly different angle managed to make Ianto lose his balance, so he tightened his legs around his lover’s waist, effectively changing the angle again as he shifted his hips.

When the next trust came, Ianto felt himself moaning inside Jack’s kiss, but he couldn’t register much more. It was perfect. Despite the distress and the pain -or maybe because of that- with the addition of Jack’s kiss, his climax was building up slowly but steadily.

After some time his lips left Ianto’s and the captain focused on biting and gracing his lover’s jaw with open mouthed kisses, making him groan in pleasure. Ianto felt Jack shifting again to steady him with only one arm, in order to let his now free hand grip his cock, leading the Welshman right over the edge.

“Jack” Ianto managed to say, despite his heavy breathing. “Jack I can’t h-”

Jack’s lips were once again on his, muffling his words and leading him straight to his orgasm. The clenching of muscles around his cock undid the captain too, who came inside his lover just before they collapsed together with the unbalanced chair on the cold concrete of the hub.

“Ouch,” Ianto said, basically still seated on the fallen chair, his muscles tingling from both the overuse and the fall. He looked up and found Jack gripping the chair legs, his forehead resting on the edge of the chair seat between Ianto’s legs as he tried to catch his breath.

He tried to reach for him, winching a bit as he sat up, and caressed his head worriedly.

“Jack, are you all right?”

Jack looked up with a satisfied grin that erased all doubts from Ianto’s heart.

“Never been better.” He answered between heavy breathings. “Sorry, the pulling out was abrupt. How are you?”

Ianto grinned back at him and rested his forehead against Jack’s.

“A little sore, but it was worth it. I loved it, but… I thought you wanted to go traditional for a while.”

Jack stifled a laugh. “Well, yeah, my traditional doesn’t include only you, me and a bed. It basically just cuts out everything that won’t include me and you inside one or the other for more than the required foreplay.”

“Does it?” Ianto asked with mocking curiosity. “Does this mean that I can _traditionally_ get a second round?”

Jack leaned forward and captured his lips in another heated kiss. When they parted Jack looked sensually at him, grinning.

“Give me at least fifteen minutes to rest and I’ll show you a couple of new tricks I learned.”

Ianto simply smirked at him and got back up on his feet, passing in front of him so that Jack could see every inch of his naked body and profusely drool over his perfectly shaped butt. The captain didn’t actually know if the shape could be objectively called perfect, but as long as it was perfect to him no one had the right to say otherwise.

“Well while you wait here, my darling, I’ll go in your bunker and _play_ a bit alone if you don’t mind. Is not like all we can do naked is fucking each other’s brain out and I want to enjoy my new life.”

Jack growled at his lover and followed suit, or in this case suit-less.

“Can I get to watch you playing?”

Ianto gave him one of his most impish smiles as he disappeared in Jack’s bunker.

“Of course. And if you’re _up_ to it, you can also join.”

Jack felt his own body trying to defeat the laws of biology to show Ianto how much he would be up to it, so he simply cursed his boyfriend and joined him inside the bunker.

Traditional be screwed.

**T.B.C.**

 


	6. Tick Tock stops the clock

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood and Doctor Who, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue bring Ianto back to Jack first.

**Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY. Graphic fooling around near the end.

When Gwen and Rhys entered the hub the next day, they found something that made her heart melt.

“Hi, guys! Coffee?” Ianto asked, smiling professionally and presenting them a couple of steaming mugs.

“Oh, Ianto, you’re fabulous, you _are_!” Gwen squealed happily, grabbing hers and taking a long sip. “Shouldn’t you wait some time before start working again?”

“Don’t worry about me, I already started with a light Weevil hunting yesterday afternoon.”

“ _Light_ Weevil hunting?” Rhys asked shocked, as Ianto plainly put the last mug in his hands.

“We were two against one: that’s light. We also got him alive.”

“Oh, wait!” Gwen butted in as she suddenly remembered something important. “Where’s Jack? We wanted to ask him the afternoon off.”

“In his office. And don’t worry, he won’t have any problems with it. We were just thinking about asking you to do the morning shift alone in exchange for the afternoon off.”

Gwen eyed Ianto suspiciously from behind the border of her mug as she sipped her coffee. “You had too much ‘ _Weevil hunting_ ’ yesterday, uh?”

He rolled his eyes and smirked at her. “Estate agents.”

“Really? You two are getting an apartment together?” She said surprised, offering him a warm smile and hugging him tightly. “Congratulations!”

“Actually,” Ianto corrected, shyly stepping away from her embrace. “ _I_ am getting a new flat, but Jack wanted to be with me anyway, because I’m still new in this year and he will be staying over sometimes, so... you know… a second opinion might help.”

Gwen regarded him with her big green eyes, nodding knowingly and finishing off the lasts of her coffee.

“Basically you’re in the transitional phase between host and guest.”

Ianto gave her an awkward smile and lowered his eyes. “Sort of.”

“I think is good.” She said, smiling and grabbing his shoulder. “For the both of you. You need something to keep you grounded, especially with everything that has been happening.”

After a moment of uncomfortable silence between the two co-workers, in which Ianto actually considered telling Gwen about his immortality –or sort of-, Rhys coughed respectfully to get their attention back. The younger Welshman gave him a sign of acknowledgement and then turned again towards his friend.

“If you’re finished with your coffee, could I get it back? You can go and see Jack then.”

“Yeah. Thank you, Ianto.” She answered, leaving her now empty mug with him and taking Rhys’s hand to bring her husband with her to see their boss.

As soon as they reached Jack’s office though, they were taken aback by their leader’s hyperactive mood. All the paperwork he accumulated in the last weeks or so had been neatly put in piles at the corners of his desk, ready to be archived, and all the alien stuff he was tinkering with was gone. Worse than that, he actually leaped in front of them with such a big smile that they were actually hard-pressed to recognize him as the same man that until a couple of days before had been grieving and fretting over the chance that Ianto could not actually revive.

“Guys, good to see you. I’ve got a favour to ask.”

“If you want the morning off,” Gwen said evenly before he could go on. “It’s fine. We were going to ask you the afternoon off, so it will just be a fair exchange of favours, right?”

She winked at him and he regarded them suspiciously.

“The afternoon off?” Jack asked, smirking. “Is something happening that I shouldn’t know about?”

Gwen simply smirked at him and punched his shoulder. “Nothing, Captain Curious. It’s only Anwen’s first recital at her school. They’re just rehearsing, but she wanted moral support.”

“Then the deal‘s done. But only if you invite me and Ianto for the actual thing. He hasn’t seen her yet.”

“Well, he hasn’t seen his family either.” Rhys argued, a little bit worried. “Gwen reckons Rhiannon will be worried by now.”

“Don’t worry, Ianto called her as soon as I got him a new mobile. He won’t let it drift again, you have my word on it. As you experienced firsthand, knowing about Torchwood helps a great deal with family issues.”

Rhys nodded satisfied and went back to his unfinished mug of coffee, so Gwen took her chance to get the subject back to what really mattered.

“So, what are the orders for this morning shift? It has been a long time since you left me in charge… This is a morning shift, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a morning shift.” Jack admitted sniggering. “Well, first of all I need Rhys to go and fetch Torchwood devices at UNIT, I got a list ready. They finally seem to have capitulated, so better hurry up before they change their mind again. From you, Gwen, I only expect standard surveillance today. Something happens? Call _me_ _before_ doing anything. I want the hub covered, so until Rhys comes back, don’t try going out in the field, not even for a stray Weevil. Understood?”

“Yes, Jack.” They both answered professionally and disappeared behind the office door.

Soon it opened again and Ianto peeked inside, ready to report to his lover.

“I finished attending to Bred and Myfanwy.” He reported professionally as soon as he noticed Jack looking at him. “When you’re ready, we can go.”

“Are we really going to stick with Bred for our new Weevil resident?” Jack asked playfully.

“Why? It seemed proper after Janet. Don’t you like the Rocky Horror?”

“As a matter of fact not much, but I would never come between you and your obsession for naming things.”

The dirty look Jack gave at Ianto made the Welshman understand that the captain wasn’t just talking about ‘ _Risen Mitten_ ’ or ‘ _Life Knife_ ’ and much less about ‘ _Myfanwy_ ’, so he stared smugly at him.

“Good, then, because I don’t recall a single time in which my ‘ _naming things_ ’ didn’t give you a good time.”

Jack let go a short laugh and then he leaped happily in front of his boyfriend to pat him friendly on his shoulder.

“I’m finished here, c’mon. The sooner we’re there the sooner we’ll come back home. I don’t like leaving Gwen in charge alone.”

“Of course you don’t like it.” Ianto teased him. “We all know that she might enjoy leadership too much and never give the power back.”

“You know what I meant!” Jack argued shocked, making Ianto burst in laughs.

“I _was_ joking! We might have had personal problems, but I never doubted her as a valuable member of the team. Not in my jealousy-free moments at least.”

Jack joined his mirth and smirked at him, flirty and provocative.

“Now that I think of it she _is_ bossy and I know you like it,” He said wiggling his eyebrows. “It wouldn’t be difficult imagining you two together… You never told me what you thought of the period she substituted me, you know?”

Ianto looked at him, faking surprise. “Didn’t I? Really?”

“So?” Jack pressed on curiously, encircling his boyfriend’s waist with his arms.

“Well, either she wanted to get rid of me or she trusted my abilities enough for the job, however at least she was the first to let me officially get out in the field with the rest of the team.”

“And it was…?”

“Not enough to make me want to do her, but it was exceptionally cool.” Ianto said boldly, in a tone that even though was light and made to amuse simply made Jack grimace.

“That exceptionally cool got you killed.” Jack quipped annoyed.

“If it hadn’t been for Tosh’s shields, the Daleks would have killed me the day they stole Earth, Jack. And if it had taken you a bit more to get me out of here when they made you… explode, then I would have ended up crushed by the debris all the same. You can’t protect me from the work I’ve chosen. Field or not field.”

Jack took his hand and kissed his knocks. “Is it ridiculous of me to wish you safe, even now that I know that you won’t stay dead?”

Ianto smiled at him and closed up the space between their lips, letting them brush lightly over one another’s.

“Welcome to my world... The idea that this is nonsense simply makes coping with it even more difficult. You will understand that soon.”

After a last kiss, Jack and Ianto left the office and then the hub, beginning their Cardiff _flats-for-sale_ tour, whilst Gwen entertained herself peeking into the police database.

She knew that if she had asked Andy, he would have happily supplied the same information, but she was also relatively sure that her friend was on holiday, so hacking would have to suffice for the day.

Not too long after she had found out an interesting case that screamed alien all over, the Government Supervision Program, which had been installed by the Future Ianto’s team and never deleted, intercepted a suspicious batch of correspondence messages between the head of Cardiff Police Department and the London one.

She curiously visualised it on another monitor and tried to make sense of what was being discussed, sniggering inwardly at the idea of the two policemen discussing important matters via chat.  Yet again, maybe they hoped not to be heard by their colleagues this way.

Apparently she had only missed the beginning, since they were still complimenting one another for the good work in keeping the situation contained. Gwen had to snort at the obviously circumstantial small talk, and wondered if they‘d had a similar exchange of greetings also after covering up for the blown up of their hub and the disaster at Thames House.

As she went on reading though, she realised that they were wasting time with meaningless praises only because none of them had a real clue of what was going on. From what she could gather, one of them was offering to call UNIT, whilst the other insisted to let the public know about the ‘ _strange anomalies in the energy flow’_ reported in the last hours, hoping that the culprit would get scared by the knowledge that they had about the situation.

Needless to say that none of them seemed much convinced with the option offered by the counterpart, so they tried various other alternatives, until the Englishman even suggested informing Torchwood Three. She found herselflaughing hard at the frightened answer of the other man, who had quickly hinted that Harkness would have been well within his rights if he simply snorted at them and left them dealing with the hypothetical aliens by themselves. All of this, obviously, only if the rogue organization didn’t help the culprit to cause more damage just for the sake of retaliation.

Gwen knew for a fact that the Welsh authority’s conjectures weren’t much far from the truth.

After what had happened four years before, the Government seemed to have developed the general idea that Torchwood had to be left alone, unless they had some good treat to pay them with for being bothered or unless it was already involved somehow. Such kind of approach proved to be the only method that wouldn’t make Jack simply put back down the receiver with a derisive snarl.

Even though she couldn’t vouch for Jack at the moment, Gwen personally knew that she never _ever_ again wanted to get involved in their power games, even though now she had got her friends and her work back the way she loved them.

While she kept an eye on the conversation still going on, Gwen opened another research program on a different terminal and scanned all the online databases for information about the ‘ _strange anomalies in the energy flow_ ’ the two policemen were talking about.

Even thought it was supposed to be top secret, she found out that in the last 24 hours ‘ _something_ ’ had been trying to absorb energy in different parts of the world, only to slowly stop everywhere else with the exception of London outskirts and Cardiff.

The anomalies weren’t big enough to be noticed by the civilians who used electric machineries daily, but they were enough to be detected and monitored by the distributors, who had promptly referred to the authorities, fearing some terrorist attack. Unfortunately, said authorities had no idea what to do whatsoever.

After Gwen had mentally thanked Tosh for the long list of easy-hacking programs she had saved in their servers and the electric distributors for having so weakly protected software, she began analyzing the recent path of the anomalies herself. It seemed that in the last twelve hours they had continued steadily all over Cardiff, whilst in London they were quickly converging on a single point.

She glanced back at the screen with the police chat on, and she was relieved to see that they had finally opted to call UNIT to check on London. Their brilliant solution left Cardiff by itself though, but obviously they didn’t seem to care.

It was time to call Jack.

She touched her comm device and sent an alarm to Jack’s wrist-strap, hoping that Ianto would forgive her for this interruption. She couldn’t deny that calling them the first time they had a chance to get a little more domestic did really seem premeditated.

When the alarm biped though, Jack was leaning completely unconcerned on the plain wall of a flat that seemed way too small and too un-Ianto for his liking. He quickly put some more space between his boyfriend and the estate agent, who were still discussing over seeing a different apartment, and himself, and answered her.

“Oi Gwen, what do you have for me?”

“ _I’m so sorry to interrupt, Jack. Believe me._ ”

“ _I_ was the one who told you to call me, why should I be angry now? So, what’s up?”

“‘ _Anomalies in the energy flow’ to use the police official definition of the current events. Nothing visible for the users, but interferences were noticed by the distributors. It began all over the world and then closed up on Cardiff and London. Now Cardiff stabilized, but the drains in London are still converging on a single point. The police just asked UNIT to go there._ ”

Jack cursed silently and then focused back on Gwen.

“We can’t do much if UNIT’s already on the case. Look, you keep checking the situation ok? Hack into UNIT too. _Before_ they realise we are following their same lead, I want to know everything they discovered alright? If the situation evolves in one way or another, call me again and we’ll be back in a sec.”

“ _Ok, Jack. Will do, see you later._ ”

“See you.”

Jack looked up from his wrist-strap and met Ianto’s worried blue eyes.

“We should head back, Jack. If Gwen called, it might be important.”

“We can’t do anything until UNIT makes contact with the London epicentre. We’ll never get to it before them and even if we could, Cardiff seems to be in danger as well: we can’t leave it uncovered.”

Ianto nodded, a tentative smile on his lips. “You’re the boss.”

Jack simply smiled back and leaned closer to leave a kiss on his forehead. “C’mon, let’s go and see some other flats before our time runs out.”

When they turned to the estate agent, she was smiling widely at them in such an adoring way that she gave them the chills.

“It might be a little off from what we’ve been talking about until now, but I’d like to show you a flat that I think deserves some consideration. It’s in the Memorial area, so the wage will be a little higher, but I’m certain we can talk about it later.”

Without even waiting for an answer, the lady exited the flat quickly, already offering instruction on how to reach the other apartment and explaining why she believed it would be perfect for _them_. They had no other choice than to follow her leading, despite feeling a bit worried.

Despite their initial reservations, the flat recommended by the estate agent wasn’t what they _wanted_ but exactly what they _needed_. It was bigger than the accommodations for singles they had been looking all the morning, and it had a double bed already installed in the largest bedroom, a bathtub big enough for two and a monstrously huge bookcase for Ianto’s thousands of books, manuals and dictionaries that Rhiannon still kept at her place not only from Ianto’s previous flat, but from their parent’s house as well.

She had never been much of a reader, but the very idea of throwing away a book, especially one previously owned by a family member, didn’t agree with her much. Ianto’s flat had been relatively small, so, despite Rhiannon’s intentions when he had moved back to Cardiff, their parents’ book collection had stayed with her, much to Mica’s delight once she had grown enough to fully appreciate some of them.

In less than fifteen minutes the deal was sealed. They also had two sets of keys for the apartment –despite their protests with the overenthusiastic seller- plus another spare one, which had been promptly sent to Rhiannon’s in case of emergencies.

They entered gladly the hub, both willing to help Gwen with the new case she had found, but their smiles and chattering dropped as soon as they entered Jack’s office and saw her worried expression.

“Something happened?” Jack asked worriedly, observing his friend slowly putting down the receiver.

“Martha just called. She said that a woman was the London epicentre. Whatever it was, the thing doing the drains wanted her, it was no accident.”

“Why are your eyes telling me that there’s more?”

Gwen simply nodded. “The target was Donna Noble.”

“What!?” Jack asked flabbergasted, rushing at her side to have a look at the laptop Gwen had brought in his office when Martha had called. “Why would it want Donna? Is she all right?”

“Martha said that whatever it was, it didn’t want to _take_ her,” Gwen answered, biting her lower lip as she tried to make sense of what Martha had told her. “It looks like it wanted to… _absorb something_ from her, actually.”

“Void residues maybe?” Ianto proposed, staring at the diagrams himself. “Or some other kind of energy time travellers stoked up?”

“Martha said she had no problems, though. She also contacted Sarah-Jane Smith, but she and her group were fine as well.”

“Has UNIT found out if there’s _anything_ wrong with Donna? Something peculiar just to her?” Jack tried again. “They ran some tests, didn’t they?”

“Well actually…”

“Actually?” He asked, raising an eyebrow expectantly.

Gwen sighed tiredly and let herself fall on Jack’s chair.

“Donna didn’t recognize Martha and worse than that she showed to have no memories of the Doctor. Nothing at all.”

Her words took Jack by surprise, but it was only a moment before something clicked inside his mind.

“Last time I saw her,” He explained, looking seriously at his boyfriend and best-friend. “She had made some sort of syncretism with the Doctor’s biological matrix. That had turned her into… something halfway between a human and a Time Lord. At least mentally speaking.”

“Doesn’t look like something a human mind can stand.” Ianto reasoned, crossing his arms over his chest and furrowing his eyebrows deep in thoughts.

“It isn’t.” Jack confirmed. “Maybe the process erased some of her memories, or the Doctor did something to protect her mind from the amount of information it had been filled with.”

“But if _that_ is what this thing wants from Donna,” Gwen argued. “What has this to do with Cardiff? We have no one with the same characteristics here.”

“Maybe the power of the rift?” Jack proposed uncertain. “That would explain why the drains didn’t close up to a single point here. It would be like searching a point while you’re standing right over it.”

“We still need Donna to be sure about what to search here, it could even be something that the rift spat out or something internal to the breach itself.” Ianto reasoned.

“Like I was saying, she didn’t recognise Martha. Moreover, because of big and fearsome UNIT, now she believes that the army wants to put her in jail! It won’t be easy to approach her if she doesn’t remember at least who Jack is.”

Jack stifled a laugh as his imagination produced a clear picture of how Donna would react in front of all those men in uniforms. “Well, she’s a strong woman. God only knows how much scared those poor soldiers are right now.”

“So, what can we do?” Ianto asked worriedly.

“No idea.” His lover answered shrugging.

“You once said she is strong-willed, but simple-minded.” Gwen rationalized. “We can try to win her over showing up at her door like people an _average_ woman would easily trust.”

“Such as? Priests?” Jack asked, looking at her confused, but she simply ignored him.

“You two go there as a gay couple and use the ordinary approach of being ‘ _friends of a friend_ ’. All things considered that would almost be entirely true.”

“I find this rather offensive towards both us and Donna.” Jack stated, making a face at his friend.

“Look, I don’t want to say it’s an unprejudiced method since we will be working on stereotypes, but look at the plus side! If you are friends of a friend, you won’t appear in the same league as the army, and if you go as a gay couple you will be automatically labelled _safe_ in a common girl’s mind.”

“Gwen’s idea has its merits, Jack.” Ianto said supportively. “And if you think about stereotypes, well, we both fall in a few of them that we could exaggerate on purpose. If she still has reservations on our story, we could always kiss.”

“Well, I’m still not _gay_ as the current definition goes and you aren’t either. We both like women too and my interests cover almost everything.” Jack argued angrily. “I won’t let you categorise me by your quaint and imprecise standards, besides how can you say an attitude is _gay_ and the other not!? What does being gay mean and why should somebody even care! Human beings are not as simple as that!”

“We’re not doing philosophy, Jack, and that’s why we said we would be working on _stereotypes_.” Gwen explained again. “It’s not like there are actual gay people that are 100% like the picture our society has of them! I know a few of them that are basically the opposite!”

Jack took her statement as a proof of his own point of view, so he simply stared at her expectantly. Gwen looked at Ianto for support, but the Welshmen simply shrugged.

“No one wants to degrade your masculinity on purpose, no matter what passes for a gay _stereotype_ nowadays. We’re just saying you’ve a different sensibility _on certain matters_ that _won’t get in the way_ of Donna believing that you are actually the _generally accepted_ kind of gay.”

“Gwen, what you’re saying has no sense. You said yourself that those _generally accepted_ _kinds of gay_ don’t exist outside the TV series! I _am_ from a different culture, but I suppose that it’s universally known that sexuality has nothing to do with being safe for women, effeminate or everything else your outdated civilizations believe to be a gay stereotype! If not me look at Ianto: he’s in a gay relationship and he’s one of the rudest men I know!”

“Well, you just have to _seem_ credible while playing the part! Surely going there with Ianto will help making her believe it even though the personality doesn’t match much. It’s obvious to everyone but Rhys that you’re a couple!”

Even partially accepting Gwen’s explanation, Jack still kept glaring stubbornly at her, so Ianto sweetly took his hand to get his attention back to him.

“Jack, what would you think if I dressed completely in white?”

“Oh, _please_ ,” Jack scolded him, shaking dramatically his head. “White is so not your colour: you’re too pale, you need something to create a chromatic cont-”

Without letting Jack finish, Ianto headed downstairs towards the cog door, dragging his lover along. “What does _this_ mean!?”

Ianto looked at his furious lover with a sombre expression. “You’ve just proven Gwen’s point, _love_. We’re going to London and, while we are at it, hope that Donna likes soap operas and dumb TV-series.”

Jack rolled his eyes and followed him, finally giving up any resistance.

“Gwen, remember to close down everything and switch alarms to my wrist strap before you go home!” He managed to yell just before the door closed behind them, his words echoing through the tunnel and the stairwell.

The trip to London became sheer torture for Ianto when, after less than fifteen minutes since they had taken the highway, Jack decided that the relaxing blipping of the drains on the computer he had on the glove compartment wasn’t enough of a distraction.

A casual hand on Ianto’s knee had soon become a languid caress all over his thigh, until it eventually evolved into shameless groping of his groin. Ianto tried not to give it too much consideration since Jack had actually given him monitoring job to do, but when his lover unzipped his trousers his confidence began wavering.

Not receiving a clear ‘ _No_ ’ to his not-so-innocent ministrations, the captain turned the subtle teasing into a full hand job that left the Welshman soon quivering and desperate for release. All of this in a particularly slow speed section due to the late morning traffic.

Ianto had firstly tried to keep a straight face, but after a while even his ever-resistant mask began cracking and soon he had to bend down to not make a show in front of whoever might accidentally turn their way. His desperate attempt to save his dignity was welcomed by Jack’s chuckle.

“I was under the impression you were supposed to keep checking the screen, Ianto Jones. Do I have to duck your pay for not following your boss’s orders?”

Ianto let out a sound half-way between a groan and a moan. “Jack, please…”

“I was serious Ianto,” Jack said in a professional tone that had none of the mirth shining in his eyes. “I want you to keep staring at the screen. We need to keep checking for eventual changes, don’t we?”

“How am I supposed to do my work like this!?” Ianto blurted out desperately, but as soon as he had said those words, Jack’s hand disappeared from his cock. He crushed his head against the glove compartment and cursed both himself for stupidity and his lover for sassiness.

“You _can’t_ be serious…” He moaned in distress. 

“You keep doing your work _properly_ ,” Jack teased. “And I might reward you afterwards.”

Ianto frowned at his lover and then threw glances at both sides to check if there was a safe zone around them he could face after he had convinced his lover to resume his handiwork, but unfortunately there was none. They were in the damn middle line, with cars on both sides, in front and behind them. They had gained a little more speed, but they were still slow enough to let everyone see them inside the SUV.

Just because bloody Jack decided to not put on darkened glasses this time.

His glare moved again towards his lover as he tucked himself in with some difficulty. If he was meant to suffer, he wouldn’t be alone. With a shift movement of his hand, he cupped his lover’s prominent erection, eliciting a strangled moan from his boyfriend with a single touch. It looked like Jack was far more gone than what he wanted to show.

Ianto grinned and then went nonchalantly back to check the blipping on the screen while his deft fingers made a quick work of the captain’s zip and wrapped around Jack’s cock, stroking it expertly.

“Fuck, Ianto!” Jack screamed wrapping his hand tighter on the wheel and struggling to keep his eyes focused on the road. “If you keep this going, you’re going to get us killed.”

Ianto had to snort at Jack’s comment.

“When I told you the same thing last time _you_ harassed me in the car while you were driving, you told me _I_ would be the _only one_ to die. Like an ugly dog.”

His hand tightened the pressure on his lover’s cock and he hastened its movements. While Jack’s strokes before were meant to tease him, Ianto’s pace was meant to quickly bring his lover to his release. Needless to say that he was quickly achieving his score.

“Just… joking…not…serious…” Jack blabbed, as his eyes searched everywhere along the highway for a place to park the SUV.

He finally found an emergency stop and decided to count the current situation as one. He was sure that he could prove to everyone unfortunate enough to question them how much it was impossible to keep focused on the road with a vindictive horny Welshman at his side.

As soon as Jack had parked the car, he found Ianto’s lips on his own and he was more than happy to give in, as he reached for his lover’s cock once again.

“Fuck yess!” Ianto hissed, as he finally felt Jack’s hand on him again. He closed up the space between them, almost sitting himself on his lover’s lap, and deepened they kiss even more, putting his arms around his lover’s neck to not fall over.

Jack moaned his displeasure at the loss of Ianto’s hand on himself, but he kept going the hand job, trembling with new waves of pleasure as he felt his boyfriend trust desperately in his hand.

“Oh, Jack,” Ianto murmured taking a small pause from the kiss. He tried to lean in to resume it, but then his orgasm caught him and his lips quirked, brushing on Jack’s ones as he groaned his release.

The captain left an adoring peck over them and then followed the line of the jaw as he held his lover tight to him, waiting for the aftershocks of his orgasm to calm down.

As soon as he was once again conscious of his surroundings, Ianto lowered his head on Jack’s shoulder, leaving a last light peck on his neck, and then settled himself back on his seat, so that he could bend down over Jack’s leaking cock. He tentatively licked the head, and the captain hissed in pleasure, earning a satisfied smirk from Ianto, who took it as a sign to move things forward as he engulfed the whole member down his throat.

Jack’s hands found their way in the mess of his boyfriend’s hair and he relaxed on his seat, enjoying the waves of pleasure his lover was giving him.

“Shall I go back to my duty now, sir?” Ianto teased not much later, releasing Jack’s cock for a short while, but keeping up the work with his hand.

“Yeah” Jack answered almost trembling, his voice rasp and teasing as he none-too-subtly motioned for Ianto to go down on him again. “Go back to your duty for your boss and _his_ country.”

His answer earned him a small chuckle that vibrated all through Jack’s frame, making him shiver even more, before Ianto put his mouth back to work on his lover’s hard cock, licking it as he pumped it slightly a couple of more times only to devour it again whole, alternatively sliding it down his throat and sucking the tip of his head.

Soon the captain tensed under his ministrations and came straight into his mouth, much to Ianto’s personal gratification. He swallowed and licked Jack clean, completely satisfied that the four years gap hadn’t made him less adept at ‘manual tasks’, nor his boyfriend any less sensitive to his special talent.

They both took a moment to tuck themselves in and to straighten up their clothes, and then Jack finally started again the car as Ianto focused back on the signals on the laptop screen.

“Here everything’s fine, nothing changed.” Ianto told Jack professionally, knowing that now his duty was once more back to the more proper ‘ _Queen and country_ ’.

“Good. Keep checking.”

“Something’s bothering you?” Ianto asked a little bit worried at the sharp tone Jack had used.

“No, don’t worry.” His boyfriend answered, forcing a more carefree tone and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I was just wondering if we couldn’t have taken the chance for something a little bit more... creative. A trip to London isn’t an everyday occurrence…”

“Oh, well,” Ianto agreed with a wicked smile. “There must be another emergency stop before getting to London, we still have time. We’ve barely delayed our arrival by- Oh.”

“What happened?”

Awkward interruptions were hardly a good sign.

“Nothing, I guess. Just… my wrist watch stopped. If memory serves me well, exactly when we left Cardiff.”

Jack checked his and also the one embedded in his wrist-strap.

“Mine too. Both are frozen at the same time.”

“Do you reckon it could be because of those anomalies?”

“Everything worked fine inside the city, it might have been something we passed.” Jack reasoned, not wanting to ruin the pleasant trip with new worries. “Cross-reference the activity points with the route we took, see if they match at some point.”

Ianto did as Jack had told him, and lost himself with the cross-referencing computer programs.

“Absolutely nothing. No big spikes at all.” He concluded after a while. “They weren’t even blipping at the time. I’m searching on the internet and among the police mainframes for something similar.”

“Good idea. Oh, and Ianto?”

“Yes?” Ianto answered, taking his eyes off the computer to glance at his lover.

“Thanks for putting up with me.”

“I’m not entirely altruistic, you know that, don’t you?” He said, winking.

“I gathered,” Jack replied, stifling an embarrassed laugh. “Still I won’t hide from you that all of this worries me a lot. Donna, the drains, the watches… and everything only a little more than 24 hours since your coming back. If I had it my way we would still be on a well deserved holiday.”

“No matter if this has some correlation with me or not, I prefer to be involved in the case, actually. My most recent memories are the ones concerning the 456 and they are not pleasant.”

“Let’s stop talking about that. Please?” Jack asked, throwing a pleading look at him. “You’re not a fixed point in time, and the idea that I could lose you so quickly after getting you back scares me… a lot.”

Ianto leaned towards Jack to leave a sweet kiss on his cheek.

“If timelines serve me well, at least I need to go back in time to warn you before dying, so there’s still time. Anyway you’re right, let’s stop bringing it up. And I’ll tell you something else.” He said teasingly in his lover’s ear. “ _I_ might not be a completely fixed point, but I’m pretty sure _we_ are going to be. We’ll find a way to bring us on even when my time will come. You said so.”

Jack nudged him away with his head, smiling a little embarrassed by Ianto’s statement.

“Yeah.”

Ianto rested his head on Jack’s shoulder, earning a small kiss on his forehead. He sighed as he relaxed, breathing his lover’s drugging pheromones, and tried to let go their worries at least for a while as his eyes lazily stared at the barely moving points on the computer screen.

Time stopped for them altogether.

**T.B.C.**


	7. Play your game

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood and Doctor Who, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue bring Ianto back to Jack first.

 **Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY. Constructive criticism is appreciated. Donna and Jack both free to talk and talk and talk… No Wilfred Mott or Ianto Jones got harmed during the writing of _this_ chapter.

 

After another couple of ‘ _starvation’_ emergency stops, including one that was _really_ about getting something to eat, Jack and Ianto found themselves in front of Donna’s residence, still betting on how many chances they actually had for their plan to succeed.

The trip had been a funny one, full of jokes and ridiculous snippets of Jack’s last four years, but the captain couldn’t stop himself from noticing that the more they approached London the more Ianto seemed to get nervous. Somehow he didn’t think that it was just something related to being a Welshman in a conqueror’s country.

“Ianto? Before we start pretending in front of Donna, do you want to tell me what’s up?”

The question shocked Ianto, but he managed to keep an almost neutral expression.

“There’s nothing, Jack. We should just focus on this.”

Jack sighed at his boyfriend’s reluctance and closed up the distance between the two of them, taking a moment to regard Ianto’s worried blue eyes and caress lovingly the small hint of stubble on his jaw.

“I promise you that when this is over we’ll have a nice, long talk, I’ll take you out for dates, I’ll put everything else after you.” He took Ianto in his arms and placed a small kiss on the side of his head. “I swear to you, this will be way better than what we had before.”

“I didn’t mind what we had.”

“But you didn’t like it” He stated matter-of-factly.

“I can’t have everything I want, can I? That was enough, Earth _must_ come first, and you are way too important to waste your time after me.”

“I know that many times it didn’t seem so, but… I’ve already chosen us above myself many times. I usually tried to cover it up with other reasons, but I really came back for you. Both times. I didn’t want to talk to you about my past because I didn’t want it to ruin what we had, not because you weren’t worth it.”

Jack could feel Ianto tightening his arms around his waist and bury his head against his shoulder, and for a moment he feared he had said too much.

“Can I really believe you?”

“Have I ever given you reason to doubt me?”

Ianto chuckled lightly and Jack felt like all his worries had lightened.

“Plenty”

“Did I?” Jack asked, amused by Ianto’s deadpan.

“Well, there’s not much to do when your lover is shy.”

Jack quirked his eyebrow at him even though his boyfriend couldn’t actually see him.

“Wait. Who’s shy?”

“You.” Ianto answered, his voice low, but sure. “Just because you’re shameless and like to brag around, doesn’t mean you can stop being shy and scared. I think that this time we were apart made it only more evident for the others, but for me it was quite obvious from the very start. After all, you first came to me to forget what was hurting you.”

“I’m going to stop being like that in public now that you’re around once again, you do realise that? You won’t have many chances to brag about your superior knowledge.”

“Good. I like to be the only one who can see you with all your defences down.”

“Won’t you get tired?” Jack asked, hesitantly. “You fell for the hero, after all.”

“I called the hero a fake and a monster actually. I fell in love with _you_ , not with him… In a way, I’ve really seen the man who told me to kill my own girlfriend die. I watched him dying slowly through lots of suffering and demands to being loved, until only you remained.”

Jack was at a loss of words, so he put some distance between the two of them and raised Ianto’s chin with his hand to kiss him lightly on his lips. He deepened it a little more when he felt his lover relax in his arms, but he still confined it to an extremely innocent one, needing the man in his embrace to feel actually _loved_ , and not just _needed_. Too easily it seemed to slip his mind that the two things weren’t exactly the same.

Even after they made themselves break apart, their eyes still lingered on one another and Ianto’s hand was still firm on his lover’s hips. As the captain ringed the door bell though, he could practically _perceive_ his boyfriend’s swift movement to hide behind him.

“Thanks for the moral support.” Jack muttered in between his closed teeth, already feeling nervous for the upcoming task.

“You’re the actual _friend of a friend_.” Ianto joked in a pretended attempt to defend himself.

He tried to complain, but that very same moment an old man opened the door, staring at them curiously with an enquiring eyebrow. In record time, Jack flashed his most charming smile and moved a little bit forward, in his peculiarly charismatic Harkness-way.

“Good morning, I’m Jack Harkness and this is my boyfriend Ianto Jones,” He told him, gesturing behind himself to Ianto, who was faking one of his best smiles and nicely weaving hello. “I’m a friend of one of Donna’s friends.”

Wilfred stared suspiciously at Jack, observing Ianto with the corner of his eye, clearly not trusting them at all. “Wilfred Mott here, Donna’s grandfather. You sound American… Pretty damn far for being one of Donna’s friends if you ask me, boy.”

Jack and Ianto silently cursed the current course of events.

They were supposed to convince Donna, they had no idea they would be tested by the old man beforehand. Maybe the gay couple scheme wasn’t the best idea they ever had… And worse than that, Jack’s American accent wasn’t something they had considered at all.

“Well, I said friend of a friend.” Jack opted for a light and carefree tone, as he tried to not sound too bothered by Wilfred’s reservations. “Although it’s true that we aren’t from around here, we live in Cardiff. We were here on a holiday in the Big City when we heard about what had happened to Donna. We met just once, but she was such a sweet woman it seemed proper to drop by for a visit. It’s so unusual for us to come to London after all.”

Donna’s grandfather seemed to consider Jack’s words, as he scanned both of them from head to toe for something that could give them away or confirm their story, whilst the other two tried desperately to project trust on him with their all too innocent blinking eyes.

“What’s the friend’s name?” The old man asked eventually.

Jack froze on the spot and his smile faltered a bit. “John Smith.”

In front of the captain’s surprised stare, Wilfred relaxed visibly. “Oooh!!You’re one of the Doctor’s friends, aren’t you? Did that lovely young officer call you in all the way from Cardiff? Martha was her name, wasn’t it?”

Jack and Ianto exchanged worried looks and the old man laughed at their reaction.

“Yeah I know everything about the Doctor. Funny man he is, but I would trust him with my life. I already did actually, and since you’re his friends I’ll trust you too. I tried to make Donna rely on Martha when she came here to explain, but my granddaughter, once she decides on something…Oh, God help her! She can’t listen even though her life depended on it, and most of the times that was actually the case.”

“So” Jack said, still a little unsure. “You trust us?”

“Oh yeah, yeah!” The old man nodded vigorously. “Can’t say the same for my Donna though. She doesn’t remember a thing, poor darling.”

Jack wanted to pursue the topic, but had to put his questions on hold when Donna appeared right behind her grandfather, worried about the long time he was taking to answer the door.

“You never come to visit and now that you’re here you waste time chatting with door to door-” Donna’s quick trail of speech interrupted abruptly as she eyed Jack, checking him out thoroughly. “Whatever you’re selling we’re buying, handsome.”

Jack flashed his best smile, took her hand and left a small peck on its back. “Donna Noble, it’s a pleasure to see you again. We met once. I’m Jack Harkness, a friend of John Smith.”

Donna’s breath caught in her throat seeing his manners and looks, but soon her practical side took over as doubts broke through her daze and she began glaring at him.

“I don’t think I would ever forget a pretty face like yours, honey. Aren’t you friend with those army guys from before by any chance?”

“Actually,” Jack said, reaching behind himself to hastily drag an equally nervous Ianto next to him and hoping that Gwen had effectively been right. “My boyfriend and I were here in London for a holiday and we learned about what happened to you. We had bad experiences ourselves with the army, so we thought to come visiting and check on you.”

“Oh,” Donna said as her shoulders dropped in total disappointment. “You’re gay. _That’s_ why I forgot about you, the knowledge was too painful to bear.”

Ianto tried to hide his amusement and gave her the most contrite stare he could muster instead, offering her his hand to shake. “Pleased to meet you. Ianto Jones. Jack told me a lot about you… I’m so sorry that such terrible things happened to a good woman like you.”

Donna took his hand, sighing deeply. “Guess I’m bound to forget about you too, uh? You look too adorable for me to remember that not only you are gay, but you’re also already taken. As I am. But that really isn’t related to the point.”

She opened the door wider to let them get inside and the couple followed her lead, fighting with themselves to look more concerned about her wellbeing than amused by the fact that Gwen’s plan had somehow worked just fine.

 

Jack took upon himself to keep Donna entertained, thanks to their common love and ability to talk about nothing for a long _long_ time. Ianto and Wilfred could do little to get a word in the middle of the double monologue, so eventually they simply gave each other desperate glances every once in a while, both wondering how the other two could keep it up without stopping to breathe.

In less than one hour they were nearly at the breaking point though, making them question their humanity at all. Last time they had checked they were still as human as they could be, so breathing _had_ to be a necessity. Not to count that Ianto had efficiently inspected Jack more than once in the last two hours or so.

When Donna’s mother came in, Wilfred and Ianto hoped she could give them the perfect chance to interrupt the two bonding friends or to at least get away from all that chatting, but despite their optimism, she was so charmed by Jack’s manners that she sat in front of him, listening greedily to his every word and tale.

Also Wilfred’s foolproof plan to escape the sheer torture with the usually effective excuse of making tea failed miserably, as none of the presents, except Ianto, paid any attention to him.

Then _it_ happened.

“…and, oh my God!” Donna was saying. “Shaun was so embarrassed! He thought it was too soon, and I had barely asked him to hug me! ‘Oh hell’ I told him ‘if I have to be your wife to get a hug then marry me now’!”

Jack laughed soundly. “All that hassle for a simple hug? You asked _me_ to hug you, and we had barely talked to each other twice.”

As soon as those words left his mouth, Jack felt a cold glare stabbing him from his side. His smile dropped and he swallowed, turning towards Ianto to check the damages. His boyfriend was staring at him with an unreadable expression on his face, as silence and dread spread from the two of them easily filling the whole dining room.

“I’ll leave you two to your hugging then.” He said as he stiffly stood up, his voice courteous, but completely void of warm. “I’ll go and help Wilfred with the tea.”

Wilfred glanced a couple of times between the two Torchwood agents and then took quickly his chance to escape towards the kitchen, followed suit by a fuming Ianto.

While he was preparing everything for the tea, the old man was so happy to finally enjoy some peace and quietness that he didn’t even notice his daughter coming in after them and staring concerned at Ianto, who was hastily arranging the cups Wilfred had put out on a tray.

“You had perfect timing, lad.” The Englishman said enthusiastically. “If Donna ever had doubts about your cover up gay story, now with that false fit of jealousy she will be completely convinced. Great work, you really are professionals!”

“I had gathered it was _that_ John Smith and that there must have been other purposes for this visit,” Donna’s mother pointed out calmly. “Still, I don’t think the lad planned it, dad.”

“What would you know?” Wilfred argued, dismissing his daughter’s concerns with a flick of his hand. “They are specialist in alien ordeals, Sylvia! Aren’t you l-”

The word fell dead on his tongue as soon as he actually turned to look at Ianto and saw the sheer anger burning in the young Welshman eyes. Donna’s mother placed a comforting hand on his shoulder and he glanced up at her, arching an inquisitive eyebrow.

“You guys being gay was not a cover story, wasn’t it?”

“ _We_ ’re not gay strictly speaking, but we are a gay _couple_. He _is_ my boyfriend.” Ianto answered furiously, letting the spoon he was holding drop on the tray to not crush it. “And when Donna and Jack met, I could’ve been killed already by the Daleks. We were next on their agenda after they disposed of Harriett Jones.”

Both daughter and father look at each other as realization finally dawned on them.

“That’s why you look so familiar!” Sylvia exclaimed. “I was certain your faces and your names ringed a bell! It was when the Earth ended up across the universe!”

“Of course!” Wilfred butted in. “ _Captain_ Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones from Torchwood, the ones with that power of the rift thing! We saw you talking with the others about how to contact the Doctor. That blond girl, Rose, wanted to join the conversation, but we didn’t have a webcam. She, my daughter, thinks they’re naughty.”

“You saw the Subwave transmission?” Ianto asked, surprised. “And why was Rose even here?”

“Oh, she hoped to find my daughter, she knew she was with that Doctor at the time. But back to you,” Donna’s mother stared at him admiringly. “You didn’t age at all! What do you use?”

Ianto stared at her puzzled, until he remembered that the Earth had been stolen not much before his demise, so he more or less looked like he did when the Subwave had happened. He couldn’t even say he was 26 at the moment, couldn’t he? If he had to show his birth certificate, everyone would have said he was 30… but he still looked 26, as Sylvia made him realize, and he was going to look 26 for a long time.

He cursed himself to have given in to his lover pleads the day before instead of continuing their lessons on immortality. He knew they were worth the time and the frustration after all.

“Web-cameras are deceptive,” He deadpanned eventually, twisting his lips in a sort of reassuring smile as he tried to elude the question.

The beeping of the kettle gave him the proper chance to excuse himself and go helping Wilfred with the scorching device just in time.

“Thank you, lad. I can do it on my own back at home, but this damn modern thing Donna bought…” He huffed in disappointment. “I just can’t get it.”

Ianto smiled at him and professionally settled everything ready.

“You seem used to this.” Sylvia praised, admiring him as much as any woman would do seeing a man strangely good with domestic tasks.

“I’m in charge of food and drinks at work… among other things. Even though we all prefer coffee, you can say I do this on daily basis.”

Luckily such an unbelievable occurrence was enough to distract Sylvia, who seemed completely enraptured by the very idea of a man properly making tea. Especially a Welsh man, as she had easily guessed by Ianto’s heavy accent. Maybe all Welshman weren’t uncivilized countryman as she had always supposed.

When everything was ready, they went back to the living room, where Donna was still comforting Jack after the hugs gaffe. As soon as they noticed the trio coming back, the new couple of _Best-Chatting-Friends-Forever_ stopped consulting altogether. She pushed vigorously his shoulder and nodded vigorously with a silent wide smile towards Ianto, whilst the captain uncertainly glanced back and forwards between her and his boyfriend.

“You prepared tea?” Jack asked almost shyly to his lover as a cup of tea was placed in front of him.

“I helped. I told you I was going to.” Ianto answered coolly, noticing with the corner of his eyes Donna exceedingly mimicking desperation.

“So…” He tried again as he stared awkwardly at the cup. “The fact that the tea is already prepared the way I like it doesn’t mean that I’m forgiven?”

“Is there something you need to be forgiven about?” Ianto asked eventually, assuming a more casual stance as he sat down and stared sincerely in his lover’s eyes.

“Look, we were all happy. There’s nothing wrong in exchanging hugs… It was just that. Happy congratulations to one another for the huge success.”

Ianto had to admit that Jack appeared to actually be sincere, so he simply sighed and stared seriously at his boyfriend. “Then there’s nothing for me to forgive, Jack. We’re fine.”

They smiled at each other, and then Jack leaned in to place a small kiss on the corner of Ianto’s mouth, making him smile even wider. When they focused back on Donna, they found her happily sipping her tea and looking at them with a dazed expression.

“Oh, please, don’t mind me. Just keep going.” She said, genuinely gesturing to them to continue.

“These are the moments in which I wish I didn’t make Shaun stay with his friends for a couple of days” She moaned dreamily with a loud overdramatic sigh. “Believing he would be safer away from me…”

“Dear, you only dismissed him three hours ago.” Sylvia argued, looking reproachfully at her daughter.

“Only because this is the first of these moments, it doesn’t mean it’s not a moment, mum.” Donna reasoned, frowning irritably at her.

“You… fear for your safety?” Jack asked, sounding _almost_ nonchalant.

“Of course!” Donna cried out, punching the table and pretending to believe Jack on the spot. “After what happened to me the army came! You imagine that!? Oh, no no… There’s no way I’m missing something important again! You have my word here!”

“We’re so proud of you!” Ianto told her as he theatrically took her hand, his eyes shimmering with overly fake commotion.

“Oh, thank you.” She tightened her grip on Ianto’s hands too, in order to impress her guests better. “I can’t let Shaun be involved, in case it’s something dangerous. I’m _so_ in need of some _help_ here.”

Donna covered up her enthusiasm and hopes with a heavy dose of innocence, whilst Jack and Ianto hid their satisfied joy with an overabundance of empathy towards her as the captain added his own hands over Ianto’s and Donna’s to increase the moment of feelings.

“If you believe something like that may happen again, you could always come back to Cardiff with us.” Jack proposed overly-altruistically. “We were heading home anyway.”

In front of the couple’s shocked stare, Donna stood quickly up, running to her room to collect the bag she had already prepared with some clothes and essentials in case the proper occasion to go and investigate her own case arose. When she appeared again back in the living room, she went straight to get her coat, looking expectantly to Ianto and Jack.

“Are we going, then? Cardiff’s a long way from here.”

“I think we’ve been played,” Ianto whispered gravely in Jack’s ear.

“I reckon it’s only fair since we wanted to play her ourselves.” Jack replied, smiling at Donna and getting up himself.

Ianto followed his boss’ lead and went to gather their garments, trying not to appear too moved when his lover familiarly let him hold his greatcoat for him, as if not even a single day had passed since the last time they did it.

“Tell Shaun I’ll call him later!” Donna cried out to her family from what seemed already a few yards too far. “I’ll be back as soon as I know what’s happening or I find out a way to settle things. Wish me luck!”

“You don’t know where we parked the car!! Don’t go too far!!” Jack yelled after her, before saying his goodbyes to Donna’s mother and grandfather, who still couldn’t believe that something like that was happening again and simply stared disheartened at the vacant door.

“Wilfred, Sylvia, thank you for the nice afternoon. We’ll keep in touch.” He said with a formal military salute, taking advantage of their surprised state to bolt after Donna before they tried to ask questions or get their willing subject back.

Ianto took a moment to pat comfortingly their shoulders and to slip a piece of paper with their contacts in Wilfred’s pocket.

“Don’t worry, I’m used dealing with the Doctor’s former companions. We’ll try our best to give her back in one piece, mortal, the same age she’s now and without alien larva inside.” He told them in what he hoped was a reassuring way, and run after his captain, hoping to catch him and Donna before they lost themselves again in some random tale.

Needless to say, he didn’t have such luck.

Not having a thing to add to their conversations during the trip back home, and being denied the chance to keep working on the computer so not to give Donna any reason to suspect what they were up to, he busied himself arranging with his sister via text messages how to have his belongings moved to the new flat in the couple of hours it would take them to _slowly_ get back from London. His main concern was to not raise further suspects in Donna when she would notice that they had never actually _lived_ inside the apartment.

Rhiannon agreed with him and claimed herself ready to help, even though she couldn’t believe he had already such time-filling cases after being back to the living for a single day. She interrupted her written rant only after Ianto swore to her that he would come to visit as soon as he was finished with this urgent job that he needed to do. Even though she stopped the overflow of messages written in caplocks, he guessed that Jack was still in for a long raging lecture on how he ought to be more of a lover than a boss.

With the feeble hope to quieten her down a bit and presumably save the captain from his sister’s fury, Ianto eventually added that now death was an event set a bit further than he had imagined in his life. More detailed explanations would follow as soon they could see one another face to face, but for the moment she’d better not to try and make a list on various ways to prove he was telling the truth.

No, there would be no need for her to understand now what he was talking about, since by the time they meet she would have certainly have it ready without knowing.

Yes, he was talking about the ever growing lists of things she wanted him to do to _rekindle_ the _family bond_.

That was a painful way to die.

While Rhiannon got the spare keys from the estate agent and organized the improvised move, Mica and David stole their mother’s mobile and decided to fill their ‘ _dead_ ’ uncle with the latest news. By the end of the day Ianto was 99% sure that his niece and nephew believed that the phone had the magic property to contact people straight from the underworld, no matter how many times he had told them that he was currently very much alive.

They had taken a little too much from their father.

It was such an energy draining texting session that he didn’t even notice when they finally reached Cardiff Bay and _his_ new flat, which was officially presented as _theirs_ as soon as they entered the building. The official version Jack and Ianto ended up giving her -in a complex and overly coordinated _Finish My Sentence_ game- was that they had barely moved in together a couple of days before their planned holiday in London.

Such a simple explanation was received by Donna with enthusiastic cries of buddy-like joy that they didn’t understand thoroughly until after dinner, when they overheard her telling her husband that her hosts were a just-married gay couple she had met while they were on their honeymoon. Somehow Jack didn’t think it would play to their advantage to explain how he had issues with each and every word she had used except maybe _‘couple’_. And that even this change of mind in relation to that particular word was a rather recent accomplishment.

Despite his confused mix of feelings on the current misunderstanding with Donna, as soon as they were alone in their bedroom Jack found himself dragged on the big double bed by a widely smiling Ianto, so the issues about what she actually believed became significantly less predominant in his life.

“Then, _husband_ ” The Welshman teased. “What are the plans for tomorrow?”

“Do what we were supposed to do today,” Jack answered, yawning tiredly. “Keep the anomalies checked and write a report on it. Obviously if things go as planned, and that’s hardly the case.”

“I can do my part here at home while I keep an eye on Donna if you want me to.” Ianto offered as he tried to snuggle closer. “No reason for her to know that we’re Torchwood right away.”

“Mmm” Jack agreed sleepily, hiding his already closed eyes behind his arm and absentmindedly circling Ianto’s shoulders with the other. “Could you also talk to Wilfred? I’d like to know in details what the Doctor did to Donna… Wouldn’t want to end up endangering her. Still need to find out what we can use to uncover what’s wrong… Cardiff should be safe though.”

Ianto caressed lightly the lines of Jack’s jaw, looking at him with eyes full of love and worry.

“Think about it tomorrow, Jack. It seems that driving all those hours and dealing with Donna worn out you. And this is saying something!”

Jack had to stifle a laugh at that. “Yeah, she’s a handful, but she’s funny and the only one who can manage to match me in conversation length.”

“Yeah, I know first-hand that you can talk for a long time. Husband.” Ianto said sarcastically as he sat up and took upon himself the duty to undress his lover for the night.

Jack growled at him and let some time pass before he had enough strength to give him a proper answer. “Enjoy it now, because you will never get to call me like that seriously, do you realize that?”

“Wow,” Ianto said, trying to not sound too much disappointed and failing miserably at it. “And here I was thinking your bedside manners were improving. You really know how to make a man feel loved. How you fair with women is everyone’s guess.”

“Why? Is not like you want a wedding.” Jack pointed out matter-of-factly.

“Well, not now! But I’m not firmly against it as a concept. I simply… don’t talk much about it, because I know it’s a sore point for _you_.”

Jack moved his arm to look up at his boyfriend, who had just finished to neatly put away his clothes and was now undressing himself.

“But you said-”

“I also said I didn’t like the word couple. I said that because I didn’t want to bother you since you had just stated clearly how you didn’t like it, but this doesn’t mean it was the truth.”

“Look, Ianto, I’m not the most perceptive boyfriend here, I know where my limits lay.” Jack said wearily. “So, could you please try being honest with me at least once in a while when it actually matters? If you keep lying or hiding, I’ll think everything is fine when it isn’t.”

“First rule about Torchwood: the butler lies.” Ianto not-so-much joked, before continuing in a much more serious tone. “Honestly, I don’t lie to you, but sometimes I might hide or omit something that could bother you, until the right moment to tell you comes. I don’t want to become one of you tales, Jack. ‘ _I had a boyfriend once, who kept bugging me about commitments and couples, but I put up with him because he shagged like an animal’_. No, thank you.”

Jack had to grant his boyfriend a smirk for his very proper impression of his own tale style and his horrible pretence of an American accent, but soon he tried to focus back on the argument at hand.

“ _You_ were the one who tried to tell everyone about my in-bed manners in front of Beth.” He argued. “And I know for a fact that you shared some weird kind of innuendoes with the others when the chances came up.”

“I guess I wanted to share my part of it before I became the ex-boyfriend to mock around.” Ianto admitted a little bit ashamed of himself. When he felt used or abandoned by Jack the only ways for him to hurt him back a little were decaf or carefully spilling bits of information of the only side of his boss that was reserved to him alone. He had never dared much, though.

He knew it was unfair to Jack, but knowing the way he usually talked about his exes and that one day, willing or not, he would have ended up in the same category certainly made the guilt less prominent.

“Ianto” Jack said, taking Ianto’s hands in his and looking sincerely at his currently pouting boyfriend. “You’ll _never_ become one of those ex-boyfriends, and I’m not saying this because now you’re immortal. All those adventures I talk about, they are mostly from the time when I was mortal or when I didn’t know what I was. I was young, a boyfriend for me was simply someone I could sleep with more than once. You might even say I liked most of them, more than loved them properly. _We_ have a different kind of relationship, believe me.”

“How am I supposed to know that, Jack. There’s nothing special in me.”

“You’re special _to me_. Isn’t it enough?”

A warm smile tugged at Ianto’s lips, as he finally lay back next to Jack and snuggled closer.

“It’s all I’m asking for.”

“Now let’s sleep, Ianto.” Jack told him, covering both of them with the blanket and leaving a kiss on Ianto’s forehead. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

**T.B.C.**


	8. Noble mind, immortal life

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood, Doctor Who or River’s nursery rhyme, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue bring Ianto back to Jack first.

 **Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY. Graphic sex right at the beginning.

 

When Ianto woke up, the morning after, he couldn’t understand where he was and what was happening.

The last thing he remembered was falling soundly asleep, fully clothed in his pyjamas next to an equally comatose Jack, but now he was rather sure that they were both completely undressed and that his lover wasn’t quite where he was supposed to be.

The gentle rocking that had awakened him stopped, so he tentatively opened one eye, only to make out Jack’s figure smirking mischievously down at him.

“Mmm” Ianto moaned in discomfort.

He wanted to protest against the early wake up, but his mind was soon assaulted by well known feelings and sensations, moreover his own carnal reaction to Jack’s 51st century pheromones couldn’t be dampened much by his barely-woken-up daze. As soon as Jack noticed that Ianto had fully become aware of his surroundings though, he took it as a sign to resume his thrusts inside his lover.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Jack murmured breathlessly in his ear as he left down his jaw a possessive trail of open-mouth kisses. “Thought we would both be finished before you woke up.”

As if on cue, Ianto slowly reached for his own cock, stroking it languidly as he looked up at his lover, his eyes pleading for a sweet kiss to match his lust. Jack was all too happy to oblige.

In a short time their tongues were intertwined wildly in Ianto’s mouth, since the Welshman had completely given up on any sort of fight for dominance. Jack explored every inch of it greedily, having denied himself to kiss his lover beforehand to not wake him up too early. Only now he realised how much he had actually missed the usual pre-sex make out session.

Jack gave up every pretence to keep his trusts controlled and, lost in their mutual pleasure, pushed inside him even quicker and harder, soon turning both himself and Ianto into a writhing mess of nerves begging for release.

Ianto allowed pleasure to wash over him, enjoying this moment of complete abandon in his lover’s arms, feeling warm and lethargic after waking up but also lost into the surges of pleasure, twitching and arching his back against the mattress.

With few more thrusts Jack came, making his lover blush at the familiar but still awkward sensation inside himself. Even undone, he never stopped the kisses on whatever bit of skin he could reach, nor the fleeting torture of his roaming hands on Ianto’s body. It took all his willpower to pull out Ianto and keep focused on bringing his lover pleasure, but as soon as he took his lover in his mouth and heard Ianto’s soft moan he felt rewarded enough.

He kept teasing, licking and stroking, until eventually he made him come inside his mouth. When Ianto was finally spent, he held him tight against himself and left a last soft kiss on his forehead.

“Damn you, Harkness.” Ianto managed to say as soon as he recovered enough breath to speak. “Also your in-bed manners didn’t improve a single bit.”

Jack sniggered at his protests and hugged him tighter.

“You weren’t complaining much. Either asleep or awake.”

Ianto mumbled something about denied consent as he hid his face against Jack’s chest, and then snuggled closer to his man.

“You’re lucky that I’m half as wicked as you are. I wouldn’t say no to sex with you under any circumstance.”

“That’s not entirely true.” Jack argued. “When you are angry at me no matter how much I try, I can’t get any.”

Ianto smirked, his lips teasing Jack’s sensitive nipples as they twitched upwards.

“That was before you learned that asking me out on dates worked perfectly to get you anything.”

“True. Mostly to get inside your pants.” Jack confirmed a bit too proudly, and then he gave him a last kiss on his head, slapping affectionately Ianto’s butt as he did his best to untangle himself from him.

“Busy day today. Better get up to work.”

Ianto pouted, but nevertheless he followed him inside the small bathroom directly connected with their bedroom to get cleaned up and ready for the day.

When they managed to finally emerge from there, it was after a quick game under the shower that evolved soon into a confusion of limbs, hysterical laughs and a towels war. They moved to the kitchen and were relieved to find no sign of Donna despite all the lost time and all the noise they had made.

The momentary privacy would give them more time to deal with their work-related issues and to decide how to deal with her when the woman would be finally up to rise and shine.

Ianto had initially thought that it would have been also the perfect chance to slip out and actually do some shopping, but he was pleased to notice that his sister had dutifully already thought to do it. If this was the efficiency Rhiannon put into helping her brother now that she knew what he did for a living, Ianto found himself even more inclined to leave her the details of his bank account.

Emergencies in the form of finding something edible after weeks he hadn’t been home for too many alien catastrophes or too much ‘ _weevil hunting_ ’ were bound to happen.

He prepared some quick breakfast for both of them and then enough coffee to keep three people awake for weeks: in other words what the Torchwood team generally finished off in a single day of work. After they had finished their meal, while Jack was oddly doing the dishes, he searched around the Rhiannon-organized crockery until he found the biggest thermos he owned and filled it with the hot liquid.

“This should get you guys going through the morning… Or at least until we find a way to introduce Donna to what we do.”

“You and your sister are always so competently _perfect_ ,” Jack sighed as he realised that Rhiannon had basically managed to bring inside the new flat most of Ianto’s belongings in only a few hours. “I’m sincerely considering a threesome.”

Ianto paled visibly at Jack’s words. “That’s out of my league, Jack. The very idea of being in bed with my own sister naked is simply… sickening. This time is definitely a no, no matter how much you plead.”

Jack sniggered and kissed him on the cheek as he took the thermos from his hands.

“You 21st century people and your ancient little qualms. Don’t worry, I’ll be a good boy and I won’t insist. She’s married after all. About work: keep your comm open and update me frequently. _I_ ’ll call Wilfred, so _you_ can focus on the data and the report.”

Ianto nodded, and after a last kiss he went to get the laptop and some paper for his report, whilst Jack disappeared behind the front door in the direction of the hub.

 

Time to realise that he wasn’t going to get any work done if he simply looked at the registrations of the data. Ianto entered the Torchwood online software to have a faster summing up of the events; while the program ran, he busied himself with the report.

By the time Donna finally woke up, he had almost written the most of it. He prepared some more breakfast for her and, after she had a taste of his coffee, he finally found some common ground he could chat with her about.

After what to both of them felt like a long time, his computer beeped and Ianto excused himself to go check the results.

“Oh, my God.” He whispered, staring at the monitor.

“Something’s bad?” Donna asked worried.

“Donna, be ready to go. We might not be safe.”

She tried to protest, but Ianto fled inside his room only to get his comm and then rush back out, crossing the living room so quickly that she lost any hope to intercept him. She huffed in displeasure, hating how she seemed to be missing things again and then retreated to the guest room to get dressed in case it really was something dangerous. Still, she made a mental note to press the matter as soon as she was decent.

“Jack, you hear me?” Ianto said in his comm. “I’m bringing Donna at the hub.”

“ _Ianto, wait. I just talked with Wilfred and apparently the Doctor said she would die if she was reminded about him or what they did. We’re full of alien tech here, and she heard about Torchwood too many times to not link together the missing dots._ ”

“We’ll need to take the risk. If I don’t bring her there we will both be dead way sooner and that’s for certain.”

“ _Has this something to do with the readings?_ ”

“Whatever the thing that attacked Donna is, it didn’t want the rift here in Cardiff, it wanted _us_! The rift simply caused interferences that covered our signal! Now with Donna here it’s probably getting stronger, I don’t know, but the dots are approaching to the flat location, bypassing the disturbances. The hub should be screened enough to buy us some time.”

“ _Ianto, why are you saying us?_ ”

“You need to quicken the records to see it, but when you do it you see that the changes are slow but steady, and by the time we were going to London they had almost left Cardiff to follow our tracks! As soon as we left Cardiff they got quicker, and they speeded up even more since Donna joined us. Here the rift seems to be slowing them slightly, but it’s not enough to stop them, not anymore.”

“ _Bring Donna here, then. I might just know what all this could be about. Save the data on your account, I’ll get them from mine._ ”

“Will do.”

Ianto closed the communication and went back to his laptop to save the data on file. As soon as he noticed Donna getting out of the spare room, he took her hand and without any more words he dragged her outside.

“Why can’t you tell me what’s happening!? You can’t keep me in the darkness, I won’t let it happen again!” She screamed angrily at him.

“They are following you too, we need to get you in a safer place!”

“But _they_ who!??”

“No idea. Jack might know though…”

“You’re not only a nice gay couple are you?” Donna argued, trying to oppose Ianto’s strength and failing at it. “Who are you and what do you want with me?”

“We only want to keep you safe,” Ianto answered vaguely, but his tone was reassuring enough that she stopped resisting. His eyes lit up in joy as they reached the information centre. “Here, get inside!”

“How’s an information centre gonna help? I don’t think they will have bunkers locations on the fliers!”

Ianto took a moment to actually consider what Donna had just pointed out as he entered the code to open the sealed hub.

“You’re right, you know? I should add some.”

“You work he-” She stopped middle-sentence as the entrance to the hub opened and Ianto pushed her towards the stairs.

Got downstairs and opened the cog door, he motioned for Donna to get inside and then he cried out for his team. “Jack!? Gwen!!”

“Ianto, the rift is going crazy!” Gwen answered, desperately smashing keys on the keyboard to stabilize the values. “Something’s trying to break through.”

“Another Abaddon?” Ianto left Donna’s hand and run to Gwen to look at her monitor.

“We had to open the rift to get Abaddon out back then, but these things are doing it by themselves! It’s like they can override the controls! Besides, the system identified two creatures, but we still don’t have a clue on who they are, what they’re made of, shapes... We know nothing!”

“Donna!” Ianto yelled at the still confused woman, while he checked the general situation through his workstation. “Wait for Jack, stay relaxed and don’t think too much, keep your mind as empty as you can. Trust me, we can explain, just not now.”

Donna nodded disheartened and lost, walking slowly to the sofa where Rhys sat silently with Anwen in his arms.

“Oi. You came to join the club of who doesn’t know what to do?”

Donna stifled a laugh at his words and sat down next to him.

“I’m not the only one then. Is she yours?” She asked, gesturing to the four years old girl, who tried to hide even more her face on her father’s shoulder, scared by the mess around her.

“Yep, and that gorgeous woman there is my wife. We wanted to say hello to mam and then uncle Ianto called uncle Jack, isn’t it sweetheart?” Anwen nodded, stealing suspicious glances at Donna and then at Ianto. “Jack said it wasn’t much safer outside and we’d better wait ‘ere.”

“What’s this place? What… What do they do here?”

“Let’s say that this is a team who likes to save the day when strange things ‘appen.” Rhys told her vaguely, not knowing how much she could exactly handle.

“It sounds nice.” She wondered dazed. “To be helpful to others, I mean. To know that you can make the difference... Sometimes I feel like I used to be like that, but then I wake up and there’s nothing I recognize around me. I don’t mind my actual life, but… I always feel like I’m missing something.”

Rhys patted her shoulder and tried to cheer her up. Even Anwen, after her first moment of doubt, decided she liked Donna and tried her best to give her something nicer to think about. Father and daughter together managed it so well that none of them noticed Jack leaping down from his office to steal Ianto and hug him, dragging him further away so that they were far from earshot.

“It’s all my fault, Ianto,” He whispered in his shoulder, tightening his hold on his lover.

“How can any of this be your fault, Jack?” Ianto argued, freeing himself from his arms to look at him.

“The Doctor used the energy of the T.A.R.D.I.S. to freeze Donna’s memories. This means pure time vortex.”

“This explains why it’s also after us… Rose filled our bodies with it. But still it doesn’t explain why it should be _your_ fault.”

“I entered all the data we had on the creatures in the mainframe to rule out a few possibilities.” Jack explained, entering a few commands through the keyboard of another station to show him the results. “And I came across these mythological beasts.”

“Never saw something like that”

“ _Alien_ mythology,” Jack pointed out. “Very ancient one too.”

“You know, lots of cultures even on Earth have this idea, that when you take something you must put something else in its place to make it even. Sometimes the purpose of this ‘ _new thing_ ’ though, it’s not just to create an equal force to even the balance, but to bring back everything the way they were supposed to be.”

“To get rid of the anomaly you mean? But why now? You are around from a very long time.”

“I thought about it too, and I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t Abaddon the thing Suzie saw inside the void, because it didn’t come for _me_ like she had announced. It wanted to bring death to _everyone_. My guess is that she saw _this_ creature. Alone it couldn’t hope to break through the rift, so I think that after some failed attempts it must have calmed down. Your coming back to life must have created another one of these though, and now there are two of them. Now they _have_ the strength to break through.”

“So” Ianto concluded, reading quickly through the information Jack was showing him. “Donna was simply caught in the middle. But if it feast on time vortex energy to ‘ _erase what was made wrong_ ’, doesn’t this mean we have a chance to get back to normal? The anomaly is us being immortals after all.”

“I don’t think that’s a real possibility. They were born in the void, the place where we were supposed to be now since we’re supposed to be dead. They will disappear only when we are into the void. I fear they want to do this using what makes us be still alive as a link to get to us, but now the time vortex is entwined with every fibre of our being and the same goes for Donna with her memories. If they get us, along with the time vortex they will take away her mind along with our lives.”

Ianto covered his mouth with his hand in shock, looking at his lover extremely worried.

“What can we do? You _can’t_ possibly die here, you’re a fixed point, changing that could cause thousands of paradoxes, and Donna… She got involved only because of us! What will those creatures do to her and to Cardiff if they break through?”

“If my assumptions are correct, they wouldn’t hurt normal people. Best case here, who doesn’t have the time vortex energy inside wouldn’t even see the monsters, because the human mind isn’t made for understand things like them and stuff like that.”

The ground chose that precise moment to shake, making all the inhabitants of the hub grasp the nearest surface for dear life.

“I thought you said normal people wouldn’t notice!” Ianto screamed angrily at Jack.

“Strictly speaking I said they wouldn’t _see_ them, this doesn’t mean they won’t _feel_ them coming!” The captain argued back in self defence.

“The rift is opening! There’s no way to stop it.” Gwen cried out, putting some space between herself and her now sparkling workstation.

They heard a loud rumble and everything around them shook forcefully for a few minutes, making things crumble on them and dusting them with fine white dirt.

“Everyone ok?” Jack called when everything stopped moving as he helped on his feet Ianto, who was coughing breathlessly.

Donna opened suspiciously one eye from her position under a desk and looked at the little girl hidden securely in her arms. She was scared to hell, but basically unscarred.

“The kid and I are fine!” She said as she checked her surroundings. “Rhys? Oi, where are you, pathetic excuse for a father!?”

“’ere!!” Rhys cried out from under a fallen bookcase, holding tight Gwen in his arms. “We’re fine too!”

“What was that explosion!?” Donna demanded, running to Jack with Anwen still in her arms. “I _demand_ you all to explain _what’s_ happening and _what_ this has to do with me!”

Jack and Ianto exchanged looks, and then the captain took quietly her hand in his.

“Some of your memories have been frozen, Donna, because if you remember you might die.” Donna stared at him, her mouth slightly open in shock. “The energy used to do it, is the same running through Ianto’s and mine whole bodies. The creatures coming after you are actually here for us. You got caught up in the middle, I’m sorry.”

Donna nodded slowly, unsure about how to handle the revelations. She sat down on the nearest chair to bury her head in her hands, letting Anwen roam freely to go back her father. Gwen on the other hand stared strictly at Ianto, her face unforgiving.

“You are immortal too, is this what Jack means Ianto? _Why_ do you keep lying to me!?”

“Gwen, we barely discovered it ourselves yesterday. There _wasn’t_ a real chance to explain, but we were going to tell you, believe me… This wasn’t the way we planned to tell you…”

“Still this explains a lot.” She said, shaking her head as she tried to not overload this Ianto with the anger she was mostly feeling towards the future version of the Welshman.

“What do you mean?” Ianto asked puzzled, perceiving the slight difference in her reaction.

“That Ianto from the future… He _was_ aged, but if you’re like Jack, this means he could have come from centuries in the future. This is what they were hiding and the reason why nothing else made sense aside the actual alien invasion.”

“You can’t actually blame me for something I haven’t done yet.” Ianto reasoned, swallowing hard as he remembered clearly seeing the same angry expression on Gwen’s face before she punched Jack some years before when they had opened the rift.

Gwen took his arm instead, and stared firmly at him. “Just no more secrets, Ianto. I beg you.”

“You’ve my word.” He answered quickly. “This time wasn’t intentional, trust me.”

She nodded satisfied and then focused back on Jack, who was checking the external CCTV to see the damages around the Plass. As he had guessed the monsters were invisible to the eyes of civilians, but they were still causing commotion everywhere as they moved and cried out in anger.

As if on cue, a loud and cavernous sound, halfway between the voice of an elephant and a whale, resounded deep inside their bones.

“You don’t just hear it, you can also feel it!” Rhys said, trying to quite down Anwen, who had run towards her father as soon as she had heard the horrific noise. “What kind of monsters are they!?”

“They want to scare us I think.” Ianto speculated.

“Well they are doing a great job with it!” Donna commented heatedly, trying unsuccessfully to hide her nerves. “What are they going to do next? Hypnotize everyone to get us out!?”

Sheer panic depicted on the Torchwood teammates’ faces as they realised that the theory wasn’t as farfetched as it could seem, and they all ran to their computers to check the CCTV near the hub. Much to their astonishment, a big crowd was already assembling around them.

“I need to give myself up, Jack.” Ianto said, facing worried his lover after seeing the destruction the monsters were making as they moved across the Plass. “Two are too many to fight, and I’m the only one who is disposable.”

“Don’t even try it again, Ianto Jones!” Jack reprimanded him as the blazing fury in his eyes managed to scare everyone else around along with his lover. “Do it and I’ll follow you in death. This time I’ve got another chance to disappear into nothingness and if you’re not going to stay with me, you know I’m not scared to use it. You won’t play me again.”

“What if us being on the other side doesn’t help!? Donna is innocent!” Ianto protested, but Jack simply stared at him impassibly.

“I ordered my own grandson’s death and watched him dying with my very own eyes. If you are not there to stop me, I could easily sacrifice the whole Earth, all the universes and the galaxies, everything living in past, present and future without even blinking. I simply won’t care anymore.”

Ianto stared at the man in front of him, straining to see in him the same courageous captain who had lead them through all kind of dangers in order to protect the Earth and the innocents living on it. He could understand the idea of sacrificing one to save all the others, even thought he would always fight in order to find another solution, but giving up everything and everyone for _one_ single person out of grief and desperation was something he was hardly willing to understand.

He had come close to do exactly that while he was trying to save Lisa, but that had eventually made him learn his lesson. From the bits he had understood about Jack’s life after his death at Thames House, his lover _had_ felt the same remorse over the death of his grandson, and he _knew for a fact_ that even giving that little girl to the fairies hadn’t been a light choice, or letting Owen’s friend get himself mauled by the weevils... Still, now, he seemed ready to do that again.

If immortality had done this to Jack, he had another reason to be scared about it, now that he himself was immortal too.

“I _won’t_ let it happen,” Jack said in a more conciliating tone. “But I’ll do it only if you’re with me, Ianto. You have still hope, you can still see things anew… And I can’t live without that. Mine has already dried out, I need _you_ to have all those instead of me.”

“We’ll work something out together,” Gwen said her voice resolute and hopeful, approaching them and offering a smile to her best friend. “I know you don’t want to lose Ianto, Jack, but I don’t want it either. And I also don’t want to lose _you_ again, nor _this_ Torchwood.”

“Besides” She continued, challenging Ianto with her eyes. “You are supposed to come here from centuries in the future to tell us you’re going to come back. If you die today that would create a paradox too.”

“Fuck” Ianto muttered, admitting defeat. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

Gwen smirked, pleased that for once she had thought about something Ianto hadn’t already considered, and Jack relaxed visibly, sensing the threat on his suicidal boyfriend’s life finally disappear along with Ianto’s resolve.

“No double suicide either, ok?” Gwen told her friends seriously. “We’ll work it out together, no matter what it takes.”

Jack and Ianto nodded unsurely, their brains actively searching for a way out.

“Gwen” The captain said after a while, his eyes blinking with determination. “Get Rhys and bring everything we’ve stocked inside the archives up here. We’re going to try everything.”

Once Gwen had disappeared with her husband downstairs, Ianto took his chance to look disheartened at his lover. “We’re not going to use our entire armoury, are we?”

“I feel like we’re missing something important. I hope that some of the weapons might just make it… click.”

“I’ll cross reference the readings we’re getting from the monsters with the drawn out projects archived online then. We might rule out something at least.”

Ianto went to his workstation and run the program, trying to not met Jack worried stare.

“You’re still thinking about giving yourself to those creatures, aren’t you?” The captain asked sadly. “You do realise that it might make things worse, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do. That’s why that would be only reserved as the last chance… I somewhat fear the paradox way more.”

“But?”

“But it’s all _my_ fault, Jack!” He said punching his keyboard as he turned to his boyfriend. “Whenever I try to do something good, someone dies! Doctor Tanizaki, the delivery girl, all those people inside the flask of the night travellers… And somehow also your grandson death! It’s always _my_ fault whenever I get involved!”

“Then you need to be little bit more selfish from now on.” Ianto stared at his concerned lover, raising an eyebrow at his words. “As long as you’re safe with me, nothing like that’s going to happen. I’ll protect everyone… For you. With you I can do it.”

“Snap out of it! You don’t have to do it for me, but because it’s right, have you forgotten it? You are not making sense and we’re running out of time.” Ianto argued back nervously, dismissing his lover’s proposal as he called forwards the live videos from the CCTV. “We’re not going to last.”

Another earthquake shook the hub and they could now see the hypnotized crowd waiting for them outside, crying out in fear in a single moment of sanity.

“Wait, why they aren’t trying to get inside?” Jack noticed, grasping tight the station to not lose his balance. “What are they waiting for?”

“The kid!!” Donna screamed, and rushed outside, following Anwen as he disappeared too quickly behind the open cog door.

“Damn, it’s a trap! Donna!!” Jack called out for her, as he and Ianto both tried to run after the woman.

“Donna, stop!”

Suddenly two loud _bang_ s resounded inside the hub, leaving Jack and Ianto out cold on the floor with a loud thump. Their shirts slowly drenched in their blood. Rhys stared at his wife shocked and let go of all the cluttered devices he was holding, his eyes fixed on the fuming gun she was still holding in her hand.

“What have you done?”

“I won’t lose them again, Rhys.” She said determinedly, rushing towards Jack to rummage inside his pockets. When she finally found his phone, she quickly searched for Martha’s number on the list. “UNIT has nothing to fear from these monsters, hasn’t it? But if the creatures get these two, they will get killed. Forever.”

As soon as she was done with the call, she bolted towards the cog door after Donna, hoping to get her and Anwen in time. “If they wake up before I’m back, shoot them again. I’ll get back my child and Donna, even if this is the last thing I do in my life!”

When she got outside, she saw the crowd disposed in circle. Each and every one of them was kneeling down and holding his or her head with their hands as they rocked it back and forth. In the middle there was only a big empty space in which Donna was kneeling down, holding Anwen tightly and presumably staring at the creatures in shock. As expected, Gwen herself could see nothing.

“Donna!” Gwen called out. “What happened?”

“All of sudden the monsters and the crowd went all weird dancing Macarena!”

“Oh, that must be because I killed Jack and Ianto.” Gwen guessed evenly as she took a hold of the other woman to help her up.

Donna looked at her shocked. “You what!?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” She explained, gesturing with her hand as that wasn’t such a big deal. “They’ll wake up soon enough.”

“You do realize you sound crazy, do you, easy-gun?”

“C’mon, let’s get back to the hub, before they come back to their senses. UNIT’s coming and hopefully they will deal with the creatures better than us.”

“How can they deal with the aliens if they can’t see them!?”

“They’ll find a way! At least they won’t die for sure like you and those two idiots that I had to shoot down! Now hurry up!” Gwen dragged Donna away, but it was already too late. When they had almost reached the tourist office, a beam shone in the direction of Anwen and stopped the young girl on the spot.

“What’s happening!?” Gwen asked scared.

“She didn’t get away on her own before, they are trying to use her as a lure!”

Gwen held tight to her daughter, but slowly and inexorably she was dragged towards the two invisible monsters along with her.

“Donna get inside, I’ll deal with this on my own! The boys will keep you safe.”

Donna stared at her and then at the two creatures that only she could see. Their long sharp teeth stuck out forward, almost parallel to the ground forming a small circular mouth, an entrance presumably apt more for sucking than chewing. It was the only actually visible and well-definite thing about them, since the rest of their shape was blurred and unfocused even for her.

It was enough to give her an idea though. She dashed inside the information office and searched everywhere until she found a spare gun. She went back outside and pointed it at the monster’s mouth.

“You messed up with the wrong temp, mate!” She cried out as she fired several bullets to the weirdly shaped teeth, breaking several of them, even thought the force of the last shot threw her a few feet backwards.

“Don’t bill me the dentist.” She said with a snort as she put away the gun and stood up to go retrieving Gwen, now holding her limp daughter in her arms.

In the meanwhile the creatures simply hauled in pain.

“How’s she?”

“She’s fine, but _you_ need to get away from here.” Gwen said hastily, standing quickly and pushing Donna towards the tourist office. “Go!”

Donna had no time to even move her feet, before she was stopped frozen. No beam had reached her, but her eyes began suddenly to blink gold.

“Donna, we have to go! Move!” Gwen prayed her, but in front of her astonished eyes, the golden dusty glow soon spread from Donna’s eyes around her whole head and silky almost transparent strands began dancing from her towards the two monsters.

“Donna!!” A male and a female voice cried out in horror as they approached the scene.

“Oh, my God, Martha!” Gwen welcomed the young medic, absolute panic seeping through her voice. “Tell me you know what to do, I beg you!”

“That’s the light of the T.A.R.D.I.S.” Martha said in a whisper as she took in the scene. “I have no idea how we can stop this…”

Martha’s companion fastened forwards, shooting the golden trail without much success.

“Mickey stop!” She screamed. “There’s no chance to even grasp it, did you learn nothing with the Doctor!?”

Only to demonstrate Martha’s words, Mickey tried to break the golden strands with his hand, but he grasped nothing but thin air.

“I think she managed to hurt them before, but she seems to be the only one who can see those monsters along with Ianto and Jack.”

“What!? Why is it only them? No, wait, more importantly: _where_ are _they_?” Martha asked, a light hope shining in her frightened eyes.

“I won’t let them leave the hub.” Gwen answered sternly. “These things are after the time vortex running through their bodies, they will kill them forever!”

“ _Their_ bodies? Wait, is Ianto like Jack now? The General didn’t say that.”

 “Now, you trust Ianto on being sincere,” Gwen snapped, but her eyes betrayed her sadness and worry. “Still, it’s true.”

Martha could do nothing but stare sorrowfully at her too.

“Oh my God…” She whispered, but then she tried to focus back on the matter at hand. “You guys will have _a lot_ to explain, but right now I need a moment to think.”

Martha pondered about what Gwen had told her and realized that she was right: Jack and Ianto had to stay out of the way. Still that didn’t leave her many other options if she couldn’t rely on the captain’s experience.

“Soldiers!” She called out to the small battalion UNIT had given her. “Shoot where the gold ends. No matter if it looks like thin air, we just have to try, ok? Ready? Go!”

A loud series of bangs echoed in the air and a thick grey dust soon encircled them all. When it faded, they could just stare in shock in front of them, since nothing seemed to have happened. Donna was still staring at nowhere in particular, her eyes void of emotions and glinting with golden dust.

“Oh, my God! Not even one got them!?? How’s that even possible!?”

“Make room for the dashing hero!” A familiar voice came from behind them.

“Jack!” Martha exclaimed accusingly.

“Jack, Ianto! Please go back inside the hub!” Gwen cried out terrified as she raced towards him.

“Stand back, Gwen, and don’t worry. We have a plan.” Jack told her, hurrying forwards with a big wire in his arms.

Ianto silently dodged her, following his boyfriend and holding a similar cable. “A plan that might even don’t contemplate our permanent death, imagine that?”

“What’s this? Death brings good ideas?”

In front of Gwen’s surprised stare, the couple connected both cables some feet from the empty space behind Donna, and then arranged the loose ends to form a circle some feet in front of the crowd that simply stared perplexed at them. When they had finished, Jack rushed to push some digits on a small panel at the far end of the wires, and then joined his lover at the centre of the circle that supposedly contained now only them, Donna and the monsters.

“Rhys” Jack said, breathing heavily as he touched his comm lightly. “Open the rift.”

Soon the wires lit up, shining with a light blue light. A loud electronic noise echoed around them as the cables charged themselves and the device got ready to function, muffling Gwen’s worried cries to stop whatever they were doing.

Jack stared at Ianto in the eyes and found his boyfriend looking at him with a completely blank expression on his face. “Ready?”

“Forever is not the problem,” Ianto said, mostly trying to convince himself. “It would only be the… thir- second time for me after all.”

The captain smiled at him and took out his gun, relieved to see Ianto mimicking his actions despite his uncertainties.

“You know, I got in contact with a friend of the Doctor not much time ago. She had blond-red hair, all curly and wild... She was stunning.” Jack told him, trying to distract his lover from his imminent task.

“Oh really, that’s news.” Ianto said sarcastically, all but distracted. “You fucked her?”

“Mind you tongue, sweetheart.” Jack reprimanded him, stifling a nervous laugh. “She sang a nursery rhyme to me. One that had hurt her a lot in her past, and it hurt her even more when I met her because her past was nothing more than her lover’s future, and she feared that her time with him had already worn out.”

“That’s a horrible fate,” Ianto said, sincerely feeling sorry for the unknown woman. “But I still can’t see why you’re telling me this now.”

“Because some of those verses upset me too, because I kept thinking about you.”

“Jack…” Ianto said, looking sadly at him in the eyes.

“At the end of it, Ianto. You will understand where this goes. There’s not much time left and this will be better than a countdown.” Jack said, holding his gun in the empty hollow left right under their necks as Ianto did the same with his own gun.

 

“ _Tick tock goes the clock_

_And what now shall we play?_

_Tick tock goes the clock_

_Now summer’s gone away_

_Tick tock goes the clock_

_And all the years they fly_

_Tick tock and all too soon_

_your love_ …”

 

Jack’s voice trailed off as he adjusted his gun beneath Ianto’s chin and his boyfriend did the same to him.

 

“… _your love will surely die_ -”

 

Two loud bangs echoed in the silence, resonating as one. As soon as Jack and Ianto’s limp bodies hit the ground the earth trembled again and the angry pained scream of the two beasts echoed everywhere.

The connection between the monsters and Donna failed and she fell down on the cold concrete too, apparently lifeless.

“Donna!” Martha cried out, but when she tried to get to her, a half moon shaped barrier blocked her from entering the circle delimited by the cables.

Inside the energy dome, light and darkness began flashing repeatedly, as though thousands nights followed thousands days, hiding and shining upon the three motionless bodies in the middle. Soon the weirdly shaped beasts became visible to them all as they writhed in sheer agony.

With a last high pitched cry, what was left of the two creatures was engulfed by the up-roaring earth that devoured them, sealing them away forever.

The ever-changing loop of nights and days soon settled for the clear light of the late morning they were enjoying, and the dome faded as the wires stopped shining.

The three bodies inside though, still lay unmoving. 

**TBC**


	9. Care for me

**Disclaimer** : I do not own Torchwood and Doctor Who, no copyright infringement intended. If you still want to sue bring Ianto back to Jack first.

 **Warnings** : Spoilers for almost everything except novels and comics. Not beta-read and English’s not my native language, but I got my usual beta-testing by SOY.

 

Gwen, Martha and Mickey stared at the three bodies lying inertly a few feet from them, hoping to see their friends speaking or at least moving, but nothing happened. The deep silence that surrounded them was interrupted only when Rhys emerged from the hub and addressed them all.

“Ohi!? Did it work?”

Their eyes shifted to him, but no one dared to say or do anything, until Gwen walked towards him, looking completely drained, to hand him the still unconscious Anwen. Before he could ask her what had happened though, she left a kiss on her daughter’s forehead and slowly strode back to where Jack and Ianto were, her eyes glinting with unshed tears.

There wasn’t the invisible dome to stop her this time, so even Martha, after seeing her success, took her chance to get inside the circle of wires and have a quick look at Donna’s general conditions. Mickey and Rhys only stared at the girls, unsure about what was required of them at the moment.

“Wake up!” Gwen cried out as she fell next to the lifeless bodies of her friends.

She gripped tightly their shirts with her hands and shook them vigorously. “I’ll wait nine days, four months, four years, but please… _Wake up_!”

Rhys slowly approached her and laid his hand on her shoulder as he turned her towards him. The small comfort he was able to provide broke the last bit of her resolve, and she began crying freely, hiding her face in his shoulder but, at the same time, not letting her friends go even for a second.

“My boys…”

“Gwen!” Martha called out as she finished checking on Donna. “She’s only asleep, what about those two? You’re _sure_ they don’t breath?”

Gwen stared back at her colleagues and touched tentatively the side of their necks, her face becoming a mask of pain and desperation when she didn’t feel anything but cold skin.

“Nothing yet!” She yelled back at Martha, her voice broken despite the mantra ‘ _they are immortal_ ’ running through her head.

She caressed their hair affectionately and settled their bloodied shirts straight again, almost feeling guilty for having ruffled them in her throes of despair.

“The gunshot healed, they might wake up soon.” Rhys offered uncertainly.

“Yeah, they will.” Gwen said without much real hope that it would be _soon_. She would care for them for the rest of her life if it came to that, out of strong will and conviction, but hope wasn’t really _her_ strong suit. “Jack did after Abaddon after all, everything is fine.”

“We’ll need to keep the three of them checked.” Martha told them, trying to be practical. “Can’t we bring up Jack’s bed and move the sofa to the medical bay or something? Don’t you have other beds where they can rest?”

“We have some spare ones in the cells, I’ll go get them.” Rhys said, leaving Anwen to one of the soldiers and bringing another one of the group along for support.

“So…” Mickey’s said and, walking to where Gwen was still grieving her friends, stared down at Ianto suspiciously “Is he _really_ the reason why the sex-starving idiot turned down the Doctor’s offer to go with him? He doesn’t look that special to me.”

“He’s smart and adorable.” Martha argued, frowning at her husband. “Not my kind of guy, but I think they’re cute together. Jack is funny, but it’s Ianto the one who makes him _truly_ laugh. I think I never actually saw Jack’s real smile before coming here to help Torchwood, and you know he does that a lot.”

Mickey still seemed lost in his own thoughts as he stared alternatively at both unconscious men.

“Are they really going to wake up?”

Gwen’s and Martha’s eyes fell on the comrades they were watching over.

“They will.” The ex-policewoman said determinately after a while. “The Doctor said Jack was a fixed point in time, and if Ianto is more or less like him then they both should be fine in the end, isn’t it? They _must_ be.”

“I agree with Gwen. Moreover, I _saw_ Jack years away in the future, I _know_ that he can’t die forever here. No matter how much the time can be a _big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff_ , I should have already forgotten it if history had changed so much.”

“Here we go again with the damn _timey wimey_.” Gwen mumbled with a deep disheartened sigh.

Martha gave her a questioning stare, but she didn’t enquire further when Gwen simply shook her head, telling them that it was a story far too long. It really was a useful excuse, Jack was onto something using that explanation every time he needed it. Mickey on the other hand gestured to some of the soldiers to come and help him bring the two corpses and Donna inside the hub, even though they found themselves fighting a bit to get some space between the disheartened girls.

The medical bay in the meantime had proven to be a bit too small for three beds, no matter how much they tried to arrange them properly, so eventually Rhys had to move everything to the morgue, much to Gwen’s horror, since she remembered too well those days of desperately waiting at Jack’s side after the whole Torchwood Three betrayal. The simple thought of doing that again in the same place scared her deeply, even though she knew that it was impossible to find a different kind of accommodation, especially considering how much the quakes had damaged the best part of the hub.

When everyone was settled, Martha expertly arranged three monitors around the beds and connected the sensors to her unconscious friends, adding an IV for Donna since she was the only one that needed feeding. As soon as she was finished, she searched for Gwen to check with her the basic things to do to keep the hub running, but she found the Welshwoman sitting between the two camp-beds where Jack and Ianto laid, staring at nowhere in particular.

“Gwen, are you all right?”

Gwen nodded, but that aside she gave no sign of acknowledging Martha’s presence or question.

“If they don’t come back to life in a couple of days, we’ll have to move them inside the morgue cryogenics, you do understand this, don’t you?”

That made Gwen actually look up at her and Martha found herself reminded of the day Owen had died without her being able to do anything to save him. Now she was more or less in the same situation, since she could barely do a thing for her patients or for the distressed policewoman.

“Yeah, as long as you don’t close them they should be fine anyway. Jack recovered safely from a much longer sleep and back then Owen had put him in the open cryogenics. He woke up just fine.” 

Martha nodded and then left her, searching for Rhys, who was now comforting his completely upset daughter, who couldn’t understand why, after all the bad things that had happened, she wasn’t allowed to see the nice woman, uncle Jack and what her parents had told her was ‘uncle Ianto’, uncle Jack’s most loved person.

She smiled at the little girl and stayed with her a little, until the child had been reassured about the others’ wellbeing enough to accept the idea to stay away from her father. As soon as she noticed a young soldier willing to play with her, she was off to bully him and his colleagues, leaving Martha awkwardly alone with Rhys.

“Gwen took it worse than I thought.” She told him, pretending small talk even though that had actually been her reason to search for Rhys in the first place.

“It’s her way to cope with the guilt, I guess.” He muttered, uncertain about how much Martha already knew. “Two days ago they had quite a row. Looks like Gwen had a crush on Jack and that messed up also her relationship with Ianto.”

“No doubts about it,” Martha said, grimacing as she rolled her eyes. “If one of my co-workers hit on my husband, they would need a doctor when I’m finished with them. It already happened actually.”

Rhys stifled a laugh, passing a nervous hand into his hair.

“It’s this work, I saw it with my Gwen. It corrupts you, it taints you. If you are already marred, it simply makes you worse, until you end up barely hanging off a cliff. Some of them try to deal with it working themselves into a coma, others have meaningless sex to escape reality, others search desperately a love that will lighten their burden. Not to mention that when they get hooked they can’t walk away, even if death doesn’t catch them first. I can’t really say I fault her.”

“Sorry to tell you this, but you really seem much too forgiving.” Martha told him raising an eyebrow.

“She loves _me_. And she admitted that she started to fancy him because she wanted relief from the dangers of the work. After our marriage she was filled with doubts again because she was left confused and without her Torchwood. Even with all this, she eventually chose _me_ and it looks like she _will keep_ choosing me. Choosing a common fella like I am when you have Captain Jack willing to shag you… That’s the most flattening thing that could ‘appen to a man.”

The proud smirk Rhys offered Martha was contagious, and she found herself sniggering at the absurd point of view he was offering as she stared down at her hands, currently resting on her lap.

“So,” She tried uncertainly to bring the discussion back to its original topic. “She’s not actually sure they’ll come back.”

“She doesn’t put her faith into something she doesn’t believe possible. She might think it hard to get, but not unattainable, it wouldn’t be worth the effort.”

“We just have to wait and hope her hunch is right, then.”

“Yeah.”

They all ended up waiting.

After the first couple of hours Martha sent off the rest of the UNIT soldiers, who kindly enough came back again in their free time to offer her, Mickey, Rhys and Gwen another set of camp beds and some food.

Later that night, only Gwen’s dinner and bed still remained untouched.

The next day, Rhys ventured outside to drop Anwen off to her school, leaving to her grandparents the obligation to bring her home, then he wandered around a bit to get something to eat for himself and the others. When he got back to the hub, he felt slightly better as he noticed his wife dozing off, resting her head against the corner of Ianto’s bed.

It didn’t seem much comfortable, but at least she had managed to grab some sleep. He made his way back towards the kitchenette, deciding to try and confront her with a mug of steaming coffee before anything else.

“Love, you can’t worry yourself to anaemia, you need to eat.” He murmured to her sweetly, startling her awake despite his efforts. “I can bring you somethin’…”

Gwen, still a little bit disoriented, took the mug from Rhys’s hands and sipped it tentatively, only to run to the bathroom and spit it out in record time. Her husband was quickly at her side, patting her back affectionately through the waves of nausea even though the worry grew heavy on his heart. If she was so nervous that her stomach wouldn’t stand coffee, unfortunately food wouldn’t work either, at least not with his wife.

When the pangs stopped, he slowly escorted her back to the morgue and sat with her as much as he could when not helping Martha and Mickey to run the hub and to check on Donna. Thankfully, in the evening he managed to make her eat a small bowl of broth, and kept staying there at her side until midnight, when he finally succumbed to sleep in his own camp bed.

A couple of hours later, Gwen ended up dozing off too, and slept peacefully until early morning, when a loud and long beep woke her up from her slumber. She jumped as quickly as she could on her feet, checking if there was any change to the vital signs showed by the monitors, but she found their conditions all unchanged: Donna’s screen was still showing a long line of regular curves, whilst Jack’s and Ianto’s were still pitch black.

She whined at the absence of variations, and thought that maybe she had only dreamed the sound. Grief had already broken Jack once, so now she knew it was only a matter of time before anxiety, sadness and boredom got to her too. Just when she was giving up and preparing to sit again between her friends to sleep some more, she heard it a second time. This time she could finally work out where the source of the sound was, which curiously enough was no other than Jack’s wrist-strap. She opened it and noticed that it was unusually set to show the current hour.

She smirked motherly at her friend, shaking her head as she noticed that even though it seemed to be working properly it wasn’t set on the correct time. She didn’t know how the device worked precisely, but years dealing with alien tech permitted her to at least do a simple task such as changing the time of a Vortex Manipulator.

As an afterthought, she checked also Donna’s and Ianto’s watch, finishing the tour with Jack’s standard one. She had almost finished setting it properly, when Martha came inside to check on her patients and stared at her with a raised eyebrow.

“I’m setting their watches to the correct hour.” Gwen explained, noticing curiously how Martha had relaxed visibly at her explanation. “I noticed they were all off.”

“Well, all that electric clutter must have made a mess of the mechanisms I guess.”

Gwen simply nodded, not looking back at Martha even though she kept feeling her eyes on her.

“We still have to put them in the cryogenics… You’re _sure_ you’re ok with that?” The medic finally said after a loud sigh.

“I was expecting you to come here to say that.” She answered, trying to muster a smile.

“We’ll keep the chambers open, don’t worry.”.

“Still I-I can’t watch you putting them there, not again.” Her voice was so small that was almost non-existent. “Can I wait outside the morgue?”

“Sure! You’ve been closed inside this place way too much.” Martha said empathically, the ghost of a smile gracing her lips. “You’ll need the fresh air.”

Gwen nodded to her and took a moment to friendly bury her hand in her friends’ hair and to leave a soft kiss on both their foreheads. As she was leaving though, two strong hands reached for her wrists and, almost at the same time, the slow beeping coming from Donna’s screen frenzied.

She had barely the time to turn back and check her surroundings that she saw both her friends sit up, gasping for hair as their monitoring screen lit up and began showing an irregular series of waves.

“Oh, my God!” She cried out in joy, as she freed herself from their death grip to crush them both in a heart-felt hug. “Don’t. Ever. Do that to me again, you two!”

The two men looked at each other, smiling relieved, and then tightened their hold on their friend.

“Don’t worry, still immortal and, more important than that, still fabulous.” Jack replied happily with a wink.

“But what happened?” Gwen asked, trying to find enough willpower to let them go.

“Uhm, guys?” Martha interrupted uncertain. “I’d love to join the group hug too, but I think Donna is waking up here.”

The three Torchwood members rushed to Donna’s side, even though Jack and Ianto looked still quite ragged after coming back to life, and had to support one another shakily. They all stared down at the young woman worriedly, holding their breath as they watched her slowly opening her eyes.

“My God, my head… Never felt so light. Not missing things is way worse than I imagined.”

“What do you remember?” Jack asked, raising both eyebrows expectantly.

Donna searched carefully through her memories. “I…I feel like I remember everything that’s inside my head. I mean, it feels light and… fine.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Martha asked as she fussed around her to check her vitals and everything she could think of.

“Martha? I remember those alien leeches playing Lily and the Tramp with the contents of my head.” Donna answered completely serious, unintentionally making Ianto break into an uncontrolled laughter.

Jack simply rolled his eyes, eyeing his boyfriend severely. “Ianto, I told you before. A time and a place.

“Yeah, sorry.” He answered, trying to get a hold of himself as he murmured another couple of times ‘ _Lily and the Tramp_ ’.

Donna’s enquiring eyebrow was more effective than Jack’s reproach to make Ianto behave though.

“What about the Doctor?” Jack asked her, successfully winning back the woman’s attention.

“What, you know the spaceman too? I remember we went to the Shadow Proclamation, because the Earth had been stolen and not even the Doctor could find it- You imagine? The almighty Doctor begging for help! And what’s worse is that after that-” Her very fast way of speaking stopped abruptly as she tried to remember something that simply wasn’t there. “Then I woke up in my own bed, in my own house… With no memories of him and what had happened.”

She tried to focus better on that batch of memory, but definitely nothing was there.

“In between that… there is absolutely _nothing,_ ” Her eyebrows crooked together as she tried to remember the details of those events, and then she stared back at them in shock. “He was there when I woke up, but I didn’t even recognize him!”   

“You’re _sure_ you’re feeling fine?” Martha asked again, surprised seeing how Donna seemed absolutely ok despite what she was telling them.

“Never felt so good in a long time, my head feels genuinely lighter.”

“Jack, what did you guys do?” Gwen asked him worried. “Maybe this has some relations to that?”

“We simply sealed our time.” Ianto explained shrugging. “Looks like we ended up connected to them the very moment we left Cardiff. After that and their attack to Donna, they were already stealing time vortex from all the three of us. Just a tiny bit every once in a while, but continuously.”

“The rift was creating interferences,” Jack specified. “That’s why they managed to reach Donna first even though she had only enough energy in her to protect herself from her own memories.”

“How did you notice that?” Gwen asked bewildered.

“Our watches stopped as soon as we left Cardiff, and Donna told Jack that hers stopped too after the attack she had been victim of.”

“Wait! I was attacked and you two barely felt it!?” Donna argued outraged.

“They were working to get to us for a long time, maybe since the very moment we died as they are extemporal beings. Obviously we saw the effects of their attempts only after we got Ianto here, because it would have been nonsense bringing back someone to the darkness who was already there.” Jack clarified. “When they finally got to us, it was only the last string they needed to attach to make the link. Donna was only an innocent source of power that wasn’t supposed to be there once they put their plan into action.”

“Once they had made the final connection though, the rift could no longer hide our presence,” Ianto continued. “And they kept steadily absorbing energy from all of us. We had to break the connection and seal off the vortex inside us until they either had to go back to where they came from, or die. Without the vortex they were stealing they couldn’t stay in this word, it was the link with us that made their void-born existence work here.”

“And to explain why she’s fine, well I think that when Donna broke their teeth,” He kept going, “She made the energy and memory flow they were getting from her bigger and more visible. This way they absorbed what they wanted more quickly. Looks like we got there just in time for them to take away every contaminated memory and the time vortex protecting it before they got all the others.”

“But she remembers everything until the stolen Earth! The seal shut out all her adventures with the Doctor!” Martha protested.

“Maybe the other Doctor-related memories were sealed away just to not make her remember the part where she’d been… Time Lorded?” Jack offered, he himself quite uncertain about his own assumptions. “When we sealed off our time we must have preserved her memories too, so everything left would stay there neat, polished and safe.”

“I’ve been _Time Lorded_? Really?” Donna asked, savouring the word on her tongue. Somehow she felt way more satisfied with Jack’s way of phrasing things than worried about why her head wasn’t exploding at the moment. “Sounds cool.”

“It was” Jack agreed, grinning. “But I guess that, being human and all, it was quite destroying your mind.”

“Yeah” Donna agreed, pursing her lips in acknowledgement. “That can really put you off.”

“Guess that Jack wouldn’t have problems with that,” Ianto muttered loud enough for them to hear.

Gwen and Martha smirked, whilst Jack simply rolled his eyes, putting his arm around Ianto’s shoulders. The Welshman simply looked up at him, the picture of innocence.

 _Stolen_ innocence.

“That’s your entire fault, do you realize that? I was an old, quiet man before we met.”

“So you didn’t lie to me completely.” Donna considered, recalling some of her most recent memories.

“Actually” Jack said, weighing up what they had actually told Donna. “Aside for the reason of our trip to London, we didn’t lie to you at all.”

“Oh” Ianto noted, smirking at him mischievously. “Does this mean that the flat is actually _ours_ and not just mine, then?”

Jack tried to not laugh as he heaved a sigh, looking at him amused.

“Ianto…” He reprimanded his boyfriend.

“What? You can still keep the bunker.”

“What will you give me if I accept to move in with you?” Jack challenged, crossing his arms on his chest.

“Sex,” Ianto answered quickly.

“What are you going to give me _that you won’t give me anyway_.”

“Sex.” He repeated more seriously, a dangerous glint shining in his eyes.

Jack stared at him with his mouth open, mulling it over. Finally he closed it and with a wide smile he clapped his hands together, turning to the girls.

“Care to come at the inauguration of _our_ new flat as soon as we’ve finished here?”

Three loud laughs answered him as they watched the final defeat of the almighty Captain Jack Harkness. Donna’s smile though, soon melted away.

“Oh, my. Now I’ll have to go back to my temp life. The Doctor has surely found someone else to replace me in the meantime… And even if he was alone now, I couldn’t leave Shaun.”

“I work for UNIT in London,” Martha offered, hoping she could be of any help. “I’m sure that they would welcome you within their ranks since you’re a former companion of the Doctor. I can vouch for you.”

Donna smiled sadly and thanked her, shaking her head. “Me among handsome soldiers and fitness crazies… Shaun would love that.”

Martha smiled back, but nodded, agreeing with her.

“What about coming here to Cardiff and work with us. We have vacancies and you already met the only two handsome males that are actually part of the team.”

“Hey!” Gwen protested, thinking about Rhys.

“ _Actually part of the team,_ ” Jack repeated slower, looking at Gwen straight in her eyes and then back to Donna. “If you swore him to secrecy, Shaun can join Rhys in the group of the husbands with benefits.”

“And what would these _benefits_ be?” Donna asked amused, echoing Gwen’s thoughts.

“Remember the job his wife is doing and see my great awesomeness.” He concluded, opening his arms to the audience like a consumed actor.

The others laughed, and Gwen shooed him out of the dramatic posture with an energetic push, making him fall straight into Ianto’s embrace.

“I might have to consult with Shaun, but you know…” Donna finally said, sniggering at Jack as she looked at him with the corner of her eyes. “You can count on me, handsome!”

She jumped on Jack to hug him, and soon also Gwen and Martha joined, as Ianto opened his arms more to include the others.

“Oh my God,” Donna pointed out dazed as she enjoyed the feeling of Jack’s muscles around her. “Can’t believe something like this has been completely erased from my mind forever. Keep hugging me, gorgeous!”

The commotion finally became loud enough to wake up also Mickey and Rhys, who joined the group hug, as soon as they noticed that everyone was fine and most importantly alive again.

The sharing of news was soon moved to the board room, location from where Jack and Ianto soon disappeared with the excuse of getting breakfast. Their departure went almost unnoticed since Gwen had finally two Doctor’s companions and a half letting her gather more information about the mysterious Time Lord.

“You’re evil, bulling me into moving in with you, you know that, right?” Jack said as soon as they were outside the hub and out of earshot.

“I know I told you I don’t want to pressure you and I really stand by that, but…” Ianto trailed off uncertain.

“But?”

“Even though I remember nothing at all of that period of darkness, I _feel_ loneliness and emptiness dampening the very core of my bones. Four years is a long time, and no matter how much I’d like to forget about it, it seems like there’s something in the back of my mind that keeps reminding me of it.”

“It’s not just that, isn’t it?” Jack noticed. “While the silence corrupted your mind, I kept living and you have no idea how to deal with it. We’re different, yet we’re still the same and that’s not nearly enough. You didn’t even know my whole past, and now we’re here again with another gap to fill.”

“I feel colder than four years ago, and you… Yeah, you feel _different_.” Ianto confirmed. “I still can’t decide if it is for better or for worse.”

“Ianto, I can’t be the same man you knew four years ago, not just now, maybe with time...” Jack admitted. “Losing you and what happened afterwards… They finally destroyed the last bit of hope and humanity left in me. You now find me way more broken and tainted with blood than the one you once repaired.”

“I _repaired_ you?” Ianto asked bewildered.

“You were my first real boyfriend after a long time.” He confessed. “A long time in which I didn’t think I deserved to be loved or that loving someone was worth the pain of losing him or her. You made me believe in all of that again, despite knowing that my condition was eternal… So I have to tell you this: I tried again after you.”

Ianto swallowed, his lips pressing together as he tried to keep the hurt under control. Jack in the end decided to simply close the distance between them and hold his hand. Such a simple and domestic gesture and yet they had barely ever shared it.

“But I still hadn’t moved on, it was what I had _with you_ that I wanted back.” Jack sighed. “It was only another failed attempt to have _you_ back, and when I noticed that I was trying to repeat our story more than creating a new one, that I realised I couldn’t survive the lies I was telling myself.”

“When I shot you,” Ianto said, apparently out of the blue. “I wasn’t certain that it would work the way you said, I thought that there was still the chance that our souls would end up sealed inside the void. I-I was hoping for that, because if it came to it, I could be the one to finally free you from your curse, the same way you would free me before it became mine.”

Jack looked intently at his lover, smiling sadly at him.

“I knew you were thinking that, that was what made me find the strength to do it myself. I think that somewhere deep inside myself I _wanted_ you to be right.”

Ianto stared at his lover with a bewildered expression on his face, and Jack had to stifle an embarrassed laugh as he averted his eyes.

“You said it yourself, you didn’t change in these four years, despite feeling cold and scared. I _know_ you.”

“You remember how I think better than I thought possible.” Ianto noticed surprised.

“I notice things, I just don’t feel like it is proper for one like me to act on everything I see. Commitments used to scare me, but being outed frightened you too.”

“What about now? I jumped on the chance back then, but you know I really wouldn’t bribe you with sex if you really didn’t want to live together.”

“It’s fine Ianto.” Jack replied, tugging him closer and kissing the side of his head. “We were heading in the right direction four years ago, and instead of taking us backwards this time apart made me believe that we need to go _forwards_. I don’t want to be alone anymore, not for a very long time at least.”

“Me neither,” Ianto admitted, snuggling closer to Jack as they entered the bar.

They ended up ordering enough food to give abundant rations to the whole British army, so when it was ready they were a bit displeased to notice that they couldn’t hold hands on the way back anymore. They would never admit it out loud, but it had felt quite nice for a change.

“How do you think we can use Donna?” Ianto asked at some point.

“The woman has an exceptional mind and she can handle herself, but we will need to train her with different kind of weapons. The Doctor does not include firearm training for his companions, but _we_ ’d better be prepared. Besides, I’d like to search for something more appropriate than a gun for her. I’ll have you go through the alien tech after she talks with her husband...”

Ianto nodded. Somehow he had problems seeing Donna waving a gun around too.

“I can have a look in the archives. In the meantime she can help me at the reception desk, even though I guess that being a temp, it won’t take her too much to at least get around the computer’s software.”

Jack stifled a laugh, asking forgiveness to his lover through his eyes.

“Yeah, I think you’d better enjoy the couple of days you will get without reception duties, because I think that such a job will always be yours for as long as we keep up the cover tourist office.”

“I don’t mind interrupting my researches and the digital filing work to remind people the beauties of Wales.” Ianto told him, his eyes shining proud and self-righteous.

“You Welsh people are something else entirely.”

“You like us for that.” He argued smugly.

“You know, one day…” Jack said in a lower voice, faking confidentiality. “I could even think about marring you for that. Even though I was thinking more along the lines of this civil partnership thing I keep hearing about.”

“Be still my heart.” Ianto said, pretending to stare shocked at his boyfriend, making Jack laugh heartily.

“I told you I wanted to play serious with you.”

As they reached the Plass, some noise behind them caught Ianto’s attention. He looked for the source of the sound, and stopped dead in his tracks, making Jack simply stare at him questioningly.

“Jack? I think we’ll need to sort out some things sooner than we thought.”

Jack didn’t even dare to follow Ianto’s gaze now.

“What do we have to deal with? UNIT? The police? Families? Civilians?” He asked with a hint of resignation in his voice.

“Put all of them together.”

The captain’s eyes widened in shock and he turned quickly to look behind himself, hoping that having a visual of what was coming could make it less dreadful. Unfortunately it was really as bad as Ianto had pictured it.

UNIT, led by its striped General, seemed ready to organize an incursion in order to have its missing agents back. The police marched sternly towards the hub, sided by a great amount of civilians presumably worried about the disappearance of half the city for unknown reasons around the Bay area, something that usually meant that Torchwood was involved.

Donna’s mother, grandfather and husband were rushing towards them too, talking animatedly to a furious Rhiannon who was dragging a confused Johnny along with her. In the back row they were pretty sure that the two people too scared to approach the area were actually Gwen’s parents, sided by a couple of teachers.

“Ehm, I’ll drop off the food inside the hub, and I’ll make myself scarce. Will you man the fort for me in the meanwhile?” Jack said already retreating.

“Good work with the escape, sir.” Ianto replied, smirking as he put on the concrete his food bags to get his PDA out and scribble something on it. “I’ll invite all of them inside and offer them some nice and hot coffee while they will be _waiting_ for you. I’ve already sent a message to Gwen asking her to get the retcon ready.”

“Nice work, Ianto, you really are a pro in whatever you do.” Jack muttered, and then he proceeded to run away as fast as he could.

Ianto put away his PDA, taking a moment to assure himself that his captain was getting away safely.

“Yeah, love you too.” He called after him, smiling shyly at the retreating figure.

The furious crowd was soon at an earshot distance, so he flashed one of his most polite and courteous smiles as he planned carefully the best way to deceive them.

Somehow, before the end of the morning, all the people belonging to the assaulting crowd besieging Torchwood Cardiff, minus Shaun, were back into their own comfortable beds, happily asleep, while the members of the preserved organization enjoyed silence, coffee, sex and weevil hunting.

For the first time, after the four years post 456 and a little bit more from the episode of the Stolen Earth, things were once again _almost_ the way they were supposed to be.

If only Tosh and Owen were with them again, everything would have been really perfect.

***THE END-TAINTED SOULS***

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next on the line there will be "Time Overlaps", once again strictly in the Torchwood-verse, but I will keep some main series characters. I hope you enjoyed the story and that you will keep following it through the last sequel!


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